Chapter 27: Relapsed BFC Diagnosed

A relapse. A slip. They said it was part of recovery, but at almost five years sober? No, this was no slip. This was a colossal fuck up as I was about to find out.

The beast of alcoholism awoken, yet I tried not to panic. I spent my time reassuring myself that my relapse wasn't so bad, that I just needed get back to meetings, be honest about what happened and take my medicine. And though I'd lost my time, I'd learned a lot the past 5 years. And I'd changed even more, becoming the grounded principled person I always wanted to be. Hell, even my Dad saw I was an entirely different person. Sure, I made some mistakes and let my guard down. But just put it right back up. I mean, if a fuck up like me could get sober, how hard could it be?

But in recovery terms, I was now a relapser. No longer bullet proof, my force field had been breached and what that meant was drinking was once again an option. All the energy and work to quit alcohol and drugs, retraining my mind to not be ruled by addiction's obsessions. I'd managed to heal my mind and body from substances, yet I took that healing for granted. And a dormant voice from my past awoke.

And the conversations would go...

Lets go have one. No, You can't. Yeah you can, just have one. But you never had just one. That was then, you didn't know anything, now you do, you can control it. You're different now. Just be strong. Just one with the boys and head home...

Every night the debate raged on, just like the captions from those Sunday morning cartoons. The protagonist torn, the devilish devil on one shoulder imploring him to act, the angelic angel on the other, pleading with him to abstain. 

Yet the devil with a bullhorn, louder, incessant, drowning out the resistance of the angel's whispered words...

Early in my sobriety, the obsession to drink lifted quickly, allowing me to live my life free from the constant cravings to drink. And what I replaced my drinking life with was a working program. That's what I was taught. To keep working a program, for shit happened in life and I needed my guard up at all times. It all seemed excessive at first, to continue meeting attendance in perpetuity. But in time I came to understand. Like the the old timers with the glow used to joke...

They went to 6-7 meetings a week, yet they only needed one, they just never knew which one it was going to be...

The old timers, they said keep coming back, and I did, but I felt shunned. AA was a program of commitment and discipline and sacrifice, not all that unlike my tennis. The code was we didn't drink no matter what and that nothing ever got better from relapsing. 

But I'd broken the code. I was now looked upon warily, even by my confidants in program. They no longer trusted my commitment to the sober life and I felt their shunning. I was put on secret probation, duration unknown, until I proved I was serious again about recovery. And that could take months if not years, time I didn't feel I had as I scratched and clawed my way back to safety.

Now struggling, I continued to attend meetings but was unable to get more than a few days. With each slip I'd come back, identify as a newcomer, mark a new sobriety date. But that got old quickly. Unable to quit drinking, I stopped counting my time, for what was the point?

Drifting further from recovery, my partying began accelerating. I was stuck in the great in-between, unable to stay sober, yet unable to function high. And I started getting scared. I'd watched this play out in meetings countless times over the years and it rarely ended well. Statistically I knew most alcoholics never got any sobriety at all. But worse yet, those like myself who got some time then relapsed, the statistics were grim, with most never making it back again. 

Did a person get only one chance at the sober life? Was I fated to be a statistic too? 

As my using intensified, I began to get quite sick. During my sobriety, my disease had progressed. Just like I'd heard 1000 times in meetings, all the stories of people going out and never making it back. I saw them with my own eyes. I visited hospitals, I went to funerals, yet I didn't heed the warnings. Somehow I thought I was different, that bad things only happened to other people. The grandiosity of it all, to think I knew better. Of all the times not to listen.

Within a month I immediately have no defense against the first drink. There wasn't even a debate anymore, just the devil and his relentless imploring for me to get high. Yet I kept showing up for meetings in various states of disrepair. But the magic was gone, the connection to recovery and a power greater than myself severed. For I'd taken my will back and I was now running the show, self-will run riot. 

To straighten out it was going to take another miracle. Did a person only get one in this life? 

Not finding the answers in meetings, I continued to read voraciously. Seeking a roadmap for living in the pages of books to my human, all too human problems. I was still drawn to Nietzsche, his pull on my mind magnetic and complete. He spoke to my innermost self. But his teachings on the reliance of the self couldn't be more diametrically opposed to the AA way. 

Yet I would read his works every morning..

Nobody but yourself can construct the bridge by which to cross the stream of life.

ADD ONE MORE QUOTE

I found solace in his words. But they drove a deeper wedge between myself and AA. I was now in full revolt, engaging in all out intellectual warfare with the spirituality aspects of AA. AA was now just Christianity with some words moved around, an affront to my hyper-rational self, incapable of engaging with the incomprehensible and irrational aspects of the spirit.

My experiment in social drinking now firmly anti-social. Beers led to drugs. Drugs led to more drugs and stronger drugs, with my behavior beginning to change. I became more reckless, even more out of control. Missing work, disappearing again, going on 3-4 day drug benders all throughout Hollywood. Running with a dark crew, dealers and hustlers and hookers and pimps, all with access to the best drugs anytime of day. I was right back to Atlantic City behavior in a matter of months. 

Trying to manage the unmanageable, but I kept trying. I'd make deals with myself. I would only party on road trips, alone, away from witnesses. Now I was back to having a secret life, out of town, seeing music. Hippy jamband shows, for years my salvation, my church, my place to spiritually regenerate. Now even they'd become cursed

All the years of experimenting, chasing the perfect high, and I'd finally caught it. Alcohol, edibles, ecstacy, mushrooms, the right amounts at just the right time and boom, I was dancing with euphoria for days on end. What a terrible time to perfect the peak state of mind. At a crossroads, knowing I was playing dangerous games with my brain chemistry, exhausting all my serotonin, setting myself up for vicious crashes upon coming down, yet the addict in me, unable to imagine going through life never feeling that way again.

The weekend getaways became more frequent. Now having discovered nirvana, I became obsessed with getting high and seeing concerts. The Grateful Dead no longer, I started chasing Phish and all the newer upstart jambands. STS9, Moe, String Cheese Incident, Galactic, Widespread Panic. Steve Kimock, Sonic Youth, Phil and Friends. 

The scene was afire. All the bands young, fresh, hungry, leaving it all out there every night. What a  time to be alive. But so so slippery. Talk about Triggerville. I was living the most extreme double life. Air conditioned country club nightmare during the week. Counter culture boundary expanding drugged out hippy on the weekends. Unsustainable, yet I couldn't give it up. The venues, the lights, the crowds, the music, the drugs. The whole experience. I could lose myself in the sensory overload. Every weekend, the vibrant scene filling an enormous void in my life, yet simultaneously destroying any hopes of  living a stable one.

Trying to hold it together, but a cycle was emerging.  The weekend getaways began taking their toll, with the come downs back to reality increasingly painful. I was working obsessively hard to go absolutely nowhere, exhausting all my resources for the blow out weekends, then back to the weekly teaching grind, just buying my time til the next weekend blowout, only to limp home again, take 24 hours to recover, and be right back at it, vowing to do better in the future.

Yet better never happened.

Intermittently, I would still attend AA meetings, but with a foot and a half out the door. Show up late, leave early, participate as little as possible. That was my program. It was obvious I was struggling, but I wouldn't let anybody in. And AA was a lonely place when you're keeping secrets and not being honest. My peers in program, they knew nothing of my weekend getaways. Yet they knew everything, for I lacked their glow, a glow I once shared with them for nearly 5 years. Now I didn't share, I couldn't share, so overcome with the shame of losing my way.  I sat in the back row at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. They called the back row of a meeting death row for a reason, for it was the closest row to the door, the door to our past drugged out lives. Yet in spite of how poorly I was doing, I continued to attend, sitting apart from everyone, squirming and scared all by myself. 

It was simply the best I could do...

My circle of friends began to worry. They suggested another inpatient treatment stay. Sensing where I was heading, I didn't object. I needed another 30 day time-out and badly. But I had one more idea up my sleeve before committing.

Desperate for a less radical solution, I concocted an idea. I would take a trip. A spiritual journey. It was Fall of 1999. Phish was coming to the west coast. I would follow them, hooking in with the phellowship, a caravan of sober phish fans who traveled from show to show. And if my plan failed, I promised my inner circle I would check back in to treatment. 

And the worst part of my plan was I was dead serious. I really thought going on Phish tour struggling as I was would be the place for me to find myself and sobriety. The pure insanity of it all.

Landing in Seattle, I headed up to Vancouver to begin my pilgrimage. I wasn't on lot for more than an hour and I was already off and running. The whole trip, 11 concerts in 13 days from Vancouver to San Diego became a transcendent mess. I came home a shell of myself, defeated once again, my best laid plans an unmitigated disaster.

At home, I made one last attempt to do better. Then the crack came back. I started making midnight runs in to the inner city, buying rock at corners from the most crazed and random street people. Super dangerous. Super messy. Pure recklessness and nothing fun about any of it.

The lost weekends soon became lost weeks with longer and longer disappearances. I was hooked and I couldn't stop. Heading for trouble again, yet I couldn't ask for help, partly from my false pride, partly from being so gacked out I couldn't put the words together. I started blowing everything and everybody off, trying my friend's and client's patience. Every binge another termite eating away at my life's remaining foundation. The dark progression of my progressive illness

With my luck running out, it was time for treatment again. But not before one incredibly difficult conversation with my parents.

Since my relapsing, I hadn't been coming around the house much. It'd been two long years since the night my father looked at me declaring me an entirely different person. Now I walked in to their house an entirely different person again, but in all the wrong ways. 

It was a difficult conversation. They were upset. They were concerned. I told them as much as I could, leaving out the more harrowing details. I told them of my struggles with AA. That I grew disillusioned, thought I had it under control, but let my guard down and fucked up. I told them how the first relapse happened quite innocently, it wasn't some master planned blowout, but even then, I didn't think it would spiral so out of control so intensely.

My father was surprisingly understanding at the bad news, agreeing to lend me the money to go to treatment again and on the weekend before Thanksgiving of November 1999, I checked in to the Betty Ford Treatment Center in Rancho Mirage California for another 30 day tune-up.

The Betty Ford Center. It came highly recommended and with great mystique. Rehab for the jet set crew. Housed in the Eisenhower Medical Center, it was more a hospital setting than the pastoral desert dude ranch motif of Sierra Tucson. But all business they were at BFC. If only I were too.

Another 30 days of substance abuse treatment. But there would be no drivers to BFC with inspirational speeches nor saintly counselors praying for my health and well-being and certainly no promises of the miraculous this inpatient stay. I was all out of recovery magic. I came in strung out and beat down. Alcohol wore you down emotionally. Crack fried you physically, like being struck by lightning. Violent. Sudden. Like a car crash. The decline so rapid and destructive.

My whole stint at BFC was a struggle. There would be no pink cloud this time through nor proud clutching of chips. In treatment terms, I was a repeat offender, a retread. I was a know it all who didn't know the most important thing, how to stay sober. But my challenges this time were different than before. It wasn't simply drugs and alcohol I was battling. It was the AA program too, the only known solution to my incurable progressive illness. And right from the first moment I set foot on the BFC campus, there it was, AA and more AA, getting jammed down my throat.

My stay went terribly. I had little willingness left to give. And I was angry. Constantly stewing. I was angry at myself. I was angry at addiction. And I was furious at AA and recovery. But beneath all my rage was a far deeper fear. For mostly I was flat out scared. AA was the only proven remedy for alcoholism yet its transformative magic eluded me. Day after day, it was AA all the time. I tried to hang in there. But I'd heard it all before thousands of times and was numb to it all, feeling none of its alchemy. So much so, against all medical advice, I checked myself out of treatment early, hitchhiking the hundred miles home, back to my broken hopeless life.  

December 31st, 1999

Y2k and a new millennium was upon us. But again, I was stuck in the past, with no idea what to do with myself. I was staying sober but barely, the flat boring part of the run, knowing full well there was a gnarly hill just round the bend. Then the relapses began. Mild at first, but before long, I was right back to full on blow outs.

Time began to fly by. One step forward, two steps back. I was treading water, waiting for a wave to ride. Looking for answers, I tried everything. Therapy, medication, meditation, but nothing was sticking. With AA once again a bridge too far, I struggled to find my way back to prolonged sobriety.

Still in the tennis industry. Somehow still employable. Somehow still playing alright. I continued to get new clients, up and coming juniors with parents who knew the game. They remembered my name from my UCLA days. They would invariably ask me questions, always wanting to know what happened to me. I would respond in a  general way, my stock answer being I had health problems that kept me from seeing my talents all the way through. 

Then they would twist the dagger, asking what was my highest world ranking? To which I'd have to tell them I never achieved an ATP point and a world ranking. I flamed out way too young. 

And the rush of shame that came with that answer, addiction having stolen my sole dream from me.

Time continued to pass. I was getting nowhere. I was going nowhere. I needed something to light a fire under me, to motivate me to take better care of myself. After one particularly good tournament, I got asked that dagger question again. What was my highest ranking? I answered once again I never got one, too many health problems to see my talents through. 

Then as the inquirer and I parted ways, he shouted back in jest.. 'You still got it. You should go out and play the tour.'

And I would politely laugh off the compliments, but then a thought hit me. What if I did try to play again? Not the tour of course, that ship had long sailed. But play with a goal, of becoming the oldest player to earn his first ever ATP singles ranking point. But go even further than that. Write a book about the whole process, about what it took to be a successful tennis professional, a literary antithesis of my tennis upbringing, and in the process surround myself with all the best people I could find. Essentially do a tennis do-over, all the while making one more earnest attempt at sobriety.

An ambitious undertaking, certainly not lacking in grandiosity. But it wasn't all that far fetched either. Excited, I got right to work assembling a dream team. I reached out to Jim Grabb, now retired from the ATP tour and living locally and he loved the idea, offering to help coach me. I sought out a trainer to get back in shape. I went back to therapy to better understand my head and emotions. And I started hitting meetings again, no longer sitting in the back row but participating this time. And most importantly, I started writing, taking copious notes about all things tennis past and present. And in a matter of months, I was back playing again, using tennis once more as an ordering principle in my life, this time with the larger purpose of my survival in mind.

I soon assembled an awesome team. I reached out to all my tennis connections from years passed, taking direction from the likes of  Jim Pugh, Jeff Tarango, Eliot Teltscher, Kim Po. Everyone and anyone who knew the game and what it took to be successful. I became willing to learn, a sponge to it all. And in no time my life started coming together.

Tennis now anchored my sobriety. It became my therapy, trading in the counselor's couch for the courtside bench. Tennis was always the ultimate physical, mental, emotional and spiritual challenge. If any one of those fields were askew, it would show in my play. But for a brief moment in time, all was going well, the downhill wind at my back part of the run. I had great momentum, finally finding a balance in my life between the philosophy of Nietzsche and the AA program.  

what truly drew my soul aloft quote

For the first time in what seemed forever, I had a purpose, I had found my why.

Tennis still had something to teach me. And I was using tennis to save myself.

2002.  I'm thirty-seven, playing tournaments, I'd been at my project for a year now but still no point yet, with the physicality of training beginning to take a toll. Now all my past doubts and demons returned. Playing locally, I lost back to back matches to a couple kids with world rankings half my age. I played about as well as my 37 year old self could play, having good chances in both matches to win, but I got tight and choked them away. 

At this point I was pretty invested in my project, but felt like I was running out of time. With still no grasp of how to manage disappointment, I took the losses hard, going on a couple bad benders. Such the wrong thing to do. But the matches, the stress, the anxiety, the consequences of losing, of failing at my life saving project. My future well-being had become dependent on the success of my project. (or so I thought) And as my lofty goals started to slip away, panic began to set in. What if I fail at this? Then what was I going to do?

Next event. Playing the Adoption Guild, a local prestigious event held throughout Newport Beach, Ca.  Playing with an old UCLA teammate John Davis, we drew the top seeds, the South African duo of Pieter Aldrich and Dannie Visser. Aldrich and Visser (BIO)  Come match time, I came in pretty shaky, having just come off a bad bender. Not even thinking about winning the match, all my thoughts centered around not getting embarrassed by the former world number ones.

Match time. JD and I took the feature court at the NBTC on postcard perfect SoCal day and low and behold, we came out playing fantastic. We won the first set, then I started getting the idea this could be the ending for my book. Win this match against the former Wimbledon champions and declare mission accomplished. Now I was excited. It was all coming together, as we continued to play about as well as we could.

Late in the second set, I stepped up to serve for the match. This was it, my chance to put it all to rest. But I got tight, real tight. Played a terrible game, pissing away my serve. And my choking had just begun as I continued to spazz, losing the second set and getting behind early in the third. Starting to fade, I began to cramp. It was the third set of a doubles match and I was finished, for I hadn't been taking care of myself again and as I continued to tire, a wave of rage rushed over me, the power of which I'd never felt before. It was all slipping away again, in public, on a tennis court, at the worst of times.

They're called red outs. Blinding rages that blot out consciousness. Snapping rackets and cursing like a sailor, now all eyes were upon me. My partner tried to calm me down, but there was no helping me this day. Losing the third set badly, I rushed from the tournament site, heading straight for the first liquor store I could find. And before I even got out of the store's parking lot, I'd drank a pint of bourbon on my way toward another world class bender. 

I simply wasn't able to manage my mind during tense situations. Monday arrived and I was despondent. On a whim, I reached out to another former UCLA team mate, a gentleman named David Livingston, who was now a therapist in Beverly Hills. Agreeing to meet, we sat and talked for hours, myself explaining my situation and my project and all I hoped to accomplish. I shared about my father, my alcoholism and addiction, and my uncontrollable anxiety in times of duress all while I was attempting to reparent myself through tennis, providing for myself all the nurturing that was missing from my upbringing in the hopes of healing myself. 

David listened intently as I described the past 20 years to him. I could tell he wanted to say something, to jump in with an insight, but he was hesitant to speak. I finally asked him what he thought. He responded that I was his friend and there were ethical issues with him working with me, but he had someone he held in the highest regard that he felt would be ideal for my situation, a peer of his in the Los Angeles area named Dr. Alex Kataharkis, a brilliant woman whom he thought I should consult. 

I wasted no time, making an appointment with her the very next day. 

Sitting across from Dr. Katehakis, I explained to her all I had told David the day before, when in the middle of my speaking she asked me to pause a second. 

I did, asking her after a moment what she thought. 

And without flinching, she looked me right in the eye and said I think you have Bipolar Disorder.

Bipolar Disorder??? How can that be?

Yes, she continued, as a matter of fact, from everything you've described, your Bipolar has been quite active in your life for some time now.  

I nearly collapsed. I began to do inventory of all the help I'd sought over the years. The two months inpatient rehab, the hundreds of hours of therapy, the thousands of meetings I'd attended, the reading of every imaginable book on every imaginable topic I could find and at 37 years old, this was the first I was ever hearing of this? That I had Bipolar Disorder this whole time and nobody caught it?

I almost passed out at her diagnosis. Then my mind raced back to 18 years before, to the time I walked the halls of the UCLA Psychology Department looking for an open door, for anyone to talk to, for I wasn't feeling well. And I found that open door and a woman inside who tried to help me. Like David, she couldn't/wouldn't tell me what she thought was wrong with me. But she gave me a phone number, saying to call and that person should be able to help me.

Was this what I would have found out all those years ago at UCLA if I had simply called that number? Was this what she couldn't tell me herself and that only a Doctor could?

Our session ended. Emotional, I thanked her. I came in confused, I walked out with the mood disorder of Bipolar Disorder. Not sure if that was a victory, but we agreed to meet again the next week

Driving home, I began rummaging through my memory for signs. 

And in the middle of my search, I began to weep. So there was a reason driving all my inexplicable dangerous behavior all these years. 

I was sick and I'd been self-medicating all these years.

Part relieved. Part exhausted. I now had an answer. I've had Bipolar Disorder my whole life and I didn't know.

But now what the hell was I supposed to do..

 

 

 

Chapter 26: Home Early Sobriety 92-97

Released from treatment after 30 days, I headed home to California an AA newcomer. Squarely in the pink cloud phase of recovery, the once ceaseless obsession to drink and use had miraculously been lifted, and for the first time in a long time I allowed myself a little hope. 

But I had my concerns. How did one live sober? My whole life was centered around partying. My friends, my humor, in bars, with drunks, getting drunk, every minute of every day plotting the next adventure. Now with so much time to fill, what could possibly replace it?

I arrived home feeling as disconnected from the real world as possible. Excited to be sober, but beyond puzzled about the direction of my life. I felt like a prisoner furloughed from a life sentence of addiction. But was it only temporary, and did I have the right stuff to make it permanent? I needed to change, that I knew. The same person was going to drink again. But could I get a recovery program in place quickly enough to protect me from the dangerous traps and triggers of my youth. For once again, I was returning home. 

Back home in every imaginable way. To Southern California. To Torrance. To my parents house and the home I was raised, to the same bed I slept in all my youth. I came home to everything, I came home to nothing. Starting life over, sober style, with my past haunting me, my future uncertain, and my present a confluence of hope and remorse.

At my folks home. I sat at the dinner table awaiting my parents. The seat across from mine was my Fathers. It was empty. Again. He will fill it later, but in presence only. We will sit for dinner facing each other with more than a table between us. 

Torn again. They saved my life. Rescued me from Atlantic City, found and paid for an inpatient treatment center so I could get better. But when The Center explained to them how important family week was to my recovery, they checked out. All the material support, none of the emotional. Once again, the mixed feelings from the mixed messages. Little was ever conventional with my Dad. Why would my recovery from alcoholism be any different?

Rushing through the small talk at dinner, I soon steered the conversation toward my time in Tucson. An addict/alcoholic for 14 years, half of my life, and I was finally talking to my parents about it. They listened impatiently, having nothing to add, obviously not having done the first bit of research about the illness that beset me. Once again, this was going to my problem to solve. 

Same as it ever was...

But I continued talking undeterred. Fresh out of rehab, full of the spirit, spouting chapter and verse. If nothing else, I wanted them to know they got their money's worth, that I worked hard there and am better now. Of course they would know all that if they came to family week, something I was fighting valiantly not to bring up as my sense of betrayal began to mount.

I continued to probe, with my parents staring blankly back at me as if I was speaking Swahili. There was an ocean separating us, but I did everything I could to build a bridge to lessen the span. Our conversation soon veered toward the intricacies of recovery, about dealing with emotions and accountability, of being of service and the importance of faith and finding a higher power and maintaining a spiritual connection to that higher power. I began to see my father get increasingly uncomfortable with the conversation's direction, eventually getting up, excusing himself from the table.

It was all a bit much for them. But alcoholism was a family disease and I had questions. Was there alcoholism in our family? What about my aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, was anybody else so afflicted? Had anybody else ever sought help? Questions upon questions, but answers were not forthcoming. They listened, trying to understand, a glass of wine in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other. 

They obviously knew something about addiction. They lived it every moment of every day. But there would be no conversation about family and alcoholism and how it was all intertwined. Just like as a child, their pasts would remain a mystery. But not their present, for there they sat right before me. They drank every day. All of my earliest memories of my Father involved a beer in his hand. But they were from a different generation than I was and they drank differently than I did. They were maintenance drinkers, same amount very day, with only my Father crossing the line of getting drunk. Were their lives unmanageable? Certainly not professionally. Did they have a drinking problem? Depended how you defined what a problem was.  

What I did know though is if you took away their nightly beer, wine, and cigarettes, they'd be mad as hornets.

With the night's conversation winding down, I finally addressed the elephant in the room, asking about Family Week and why they didn't come. They responded they couldn't make it, that they couldn't get out of work. I remained silent, watching closely to their reactions. Yet there was no crack in their front. It was their party line and they were sticking to it. 

To have been a fly on the wall of that conversation... 

With the evening winding down, Dad finally jumped in, saying Mom and him, on a scale of 0-100 on emotional development, were both zeroes, so all this talk about emotions and stuff, don't be looking to them for anything. 

Gotta respect the honesty. The effort, not so much.

But Dad wasn't done. I knew he had ideas about things. Finally he got up, looked my way, and said if I just got a full time job and worked 9-5, I wouldn't have any time to think about drinking. Trying not to react, I chuckled when I needed to scream, for I knew better than to argue with him about such things. 

It was the only world he knew...

I arrived home with a detailed aftercare packet. Sierra Tucson suggested I attend 90 meetings in my first 90 days. Seemed a bit much, but all I had was time. There was an Alano Club a short bike ride from my folks house, a dingy one room hall where AA meetings convened all day long. My first day there and its clear this wasn't Sierra Tucson. No super models, no Academy award winning actors, no former professional athletes. These were low bottom drunks. Street people, ex-cons, hardened biker types. They had a meeting called The Whips and Chains Group. I immediately saw why.

It was grim there. Not my tribe for sure. But blessed with the gift of desperation, I continued to attend avidly. But I was having a terrible time connecting. With the program. With the message. With the people. With myself. It was the classic AA stereotype. Plastic chairs, bad coffee, chain smoking, older hard cases just as apt to slice me as shake my hand. I stayed mostly to myself, trying not to judge. But I was out of place there. There had to be better meetings for me than these. If I had to sit in rooms like these forever to stay sober, I was a goner.

I was discovering recovery was far different in the real world. There was no front desk, no welcoming committee, nobody explaining all the intricacies of early sobriety. I could leave early, show up late, or not attend at all. There were no rules. Just empty rooms full of folding metal chairs. And I was desperate enough to grab one, plop my ass down and listen for the message. Just myself and dozens of anonymous drunks. I was immediately struck by recovery's spectrum. Old timers with 20 years sobriety sitting next to wet ones with 20 minutes. But all were welcome if they had the desire to stop drinking. 

The old timers, they had a different glow about them. Their eyes, they shined. You could feel it. Survivors. Folks who'd seen a thing or two. Yet here they sat. Sharing their experience strength and hope with all fellow seekers. They'd passed over to another realm, a realm of the spirit. It was a holy glow. Deeply spiritual. God was the answer, no matter what your question. 

The old timers seemed to hover above the room unaffected, as if gazing down upon a spectacle. They'd transformed themselves, as vehicles of an almighty higher power. I looked upon them as an exhibit in a museum, their transformation so beyond my ability to comprehend. I saw on them no portal for me to connect. They appeared so heavenly to me they were no longer of any Earthly good. But they were sober. The luckiest of few in a world of struggling alcoholics. After spending time in their presence, it was hard not to conclude the AA program worked far too well for far too few.

Trying to get my head around the philosophies of recovery. One day at a time, one moment at a time. And in spite of my inherent skepticism, I could see AA working. I was scared straight now, at least for the moment. But would it last? This shouldn't be that hard. To not do something. The accomplishment of the sober fellow, the celebration even, was in not doing something. As someone raised an achiever, it was a foreign energy to absorb. I didn't poison myself today. Yay! 

Slow to assimilate, I continued to attend meetings. Alcoholics as a whole seemed uptight, neurotic, hopelessly self-obsessed. Because they were. Because I was too. It was the ism part of alcoholism. But I didn't like it in them and I certainly didn't like it in me. Yet it was the common experience we shared as alcoholics. Was my social circle now to be defined by the diseases we shared?

I began to venture out from the local Alano Club, trying all sorts of meetings. I soon found there was something for everybody. Book studies, Step work, Speaker meetings, prayer and meditation vigils. The noon time men's stag. Men with issues. Everyday from 12-1, in the scary back room of the Alano club one could here the unemployed construction worker rap. 

As I continued to have a hard time connecting...

But I kept exploring. I finally started seeing people from my past. We were saving you a seat, they would say. It was oddly comforting seeing people I used to rage with sitting sober in meetings of AA. I was not the only one. I knew I couldn't have been. 

But being back in the South Bay was triggerville, the scene of so many crimes. Slinking around my old home town, seeing people from all chapters of my life. Yet I was still unsure of so much. How much did they know? Now that I was sober, do I just tell them? But how much? It was suggested we shared in a general way, but how general was general? How vague should I remain?

Living back in Torrance I was haunted. All the bars I drank at, all the corners I got high at. Everywhere I pass, memories flashed like lightning in a night sky. Quick flashes of time and place. Images I can't quite place nor shake, my recall of those late night details incomplete and blurry. And maybe not being able to remember all my debauchery was a gift of the program.

Deliver me from evil that I may better do thy will... 

A month in Tucson and two at home and I could feel I'm changing. I was staying sober, but I didn't trust it. For I didn't trust myself. Not even close. There was a voice in my head telling me there was no way I was going to pull this off. Once a fuck up, always a fuck up. Because being a fuck up was all I knew, with these couple months of self care feeling so foreign. But I really was staying sober. Once thirty days. Now sixty days. Now ninety days. Collecting chips, collecting time, feeling better and better physically with each passing day.

But could I maintain this, for the discipline required to sustain something forever was not exactly my longsuit. And being only 28 years old, forever seemed like an eternity. Because it was. 

Compounding the daunting task of staying sober forever was the sheer emotional madness of early sobriety. Its said emotional development in the alcoholic ceases at the time addiction sets in. Which meant I was 28 going on 15. And I felt like it. My emotions were all over the map. Moody, anxious, edgy by day. Restless, irritable and discontented by night, with obsessive thought patterns ruling my every moment. My ass-kicking machine was cranked up to full tilt. It was all so exhausting.

The oldtimers, they said keep coming back, it gets better, get out of yourself, be of service. Yet I began to feel overwhelmed. In over my head while stuck in my head, I was struggling to get my life back on track. I'd quit drinking before for brief stretches, but that was pure white knuckling it, with no program or long term commitment. But this round was different. With Atlantic City and the horrors of rehab etched on to my psyche, never drinking again was no longer a choice, it was the whole game and if I wanted to keep getting what I was getting, I needed to be working a program and that would only come with finding a sponsor.

Venturing out to LA's west side, I discovered a more sophisticated brand of recovery. At my first meeting in Pacific Palisades, I was impressed by how well spoken and smartly dressed everyone was,  helping me feel a little less lost. Behind on getting a sponsor, I remembered what I was told at treatment. Find someone who has what you want. A gentleman then took the podium to speak. Smart, articulate, well versed in Book and program, he was able to tie his whole message together, in full sentences no less. 

At meeting's end, I approached him somewhat awkwardly. Before even introducing myself, I asked him if he'd sponsor me. He responded his name was Gus and he'd be happy to. Walking to my car, we exchanged phone numbers, with him immediately putting me to work. I was to read the Doctor's Opinion and be prepared to discuss it with him over coffee that weekend. I agreed eagerly to his terms. With a sponsor and an assignment, I was now officially working the program. There was no turning back now.

A sponsor. Taking directions from another human being. Not always a strength of mine. Father, Coaches, Therapists, Bosses. Somehow I always thought I knew better. But this was alcoholism. Cunning baffling powerful. I knew nothing about sobriety. But Gus did. With no margin for error, I did everything he asked of me. And it worked. The unconditional love of one alcoholic for another. The patience, the teaching, the acceptance, the guidance. Gaining control by giving up control. I was still early in recovery, feeling crazy as a loon, but in small glimpses, I felt better, I felt the progress. I felt my healing beginning.

December 1992. Ninety meetings in ninety days completed, I decided to enter a couple local singles events.  SoCal tennis again, with all the usual suspects from my youth still playing. Except it was different now. We were all older, on the backsides of our Bell Curves, with nobody playing the tour anymore. They were done with all that. They were all former players now, preparing for life's next challenges.

But I entered the fray differently. I was looking to exorcise some demons, maybe close out some regrets and achieve some healthy closure with this mercurial tennis, to be able to walk away from the game with my head held somewhere other than low. 

I entered the events with an odd energy, fighting for my life while having given up on it mere months ago. The comings and goings of the addled mind. But a funny thing happened when I took the court. I didn't feel all the old angst or the crippling nervy pressure. Almost losing my life put tennis in a different perspective. What I though was pressure before, playing tight matches for cash and prizes wasn't really pressure. Real pressure was being in an Atlantic City hospital, not knowing if anyone would take your call. Real pressure was knowing if I picked up a drink, it would be the beginning of the end of me.

Around Christmas, the Jack Kramer Club held its annual Holiday classic, a powerful event of current and former pros from all across the Southern California. Playing well, I managed to win a couple rounds, before facing former junior rival and JDC teammate Jonathan Canter. Pumped up, I dug in for the match like my life depended on it. I got off to a great start, winning the first set with chances of closing out the match in straight sets, but I floundered. About to begin the deciding third set, Jonathan walked up to the net to shake hands to retire, for the player he was there coaching was about to start her match and he had to watch her.

Jonathan was just playing for fun. I immediately felt ridiculous for taking the match so seriously. Then the reality hit me. The war was over. It was time to lay down my weapons and come out of the bush. There was nothing to fight about anymore.

The whole experience was bittersweet. Though it was great to play some good tennis again while seeing all the my junior tennis peers, it was like going to a class reunion where all your crew went on to do great things and you're selling vacuum cleaners.

I continued to play over the holidays. One of my old buddies from my first tennis club was in town, Woody Hunt. Kalamazoo finalist and 3 time All-American at Berkeley, I gave Woody his first beer when he was 14. I would take him to his first AA meeting many years later. A super player in his own right and one of my favorite people. 

We played a couple days running and I was beating him pretty badly. We agreed to meet one more time the next day and at West End in front of a packed house on center court and I played the practice match of a lifetime, beating him 0,0, floating around the court in a zone for the ages.

After the match, gathering up our stuff, Woody started laughing. He said that was the best anyone's ever played against him and that I needed to get on the phone right now and find a tournament to enter. He said if I was going to play like that, I had to go play. 

Unsure if he was serious or not, he soon escorted me to the pay phones, dialing up a number at the USTA. But it was Christmas and the offices were closed for the holidays. More importantly, I was scheduled to start back at UCLA in a couple of weeks to finish my education. And though it felt great to still be able to play tennis at such a high level, all this manic talk about somehow going out to play the tour needed to be put to rest for good. I had missed my moment (a few times)  It was too late to ever become a professional tennis player. And though there was no shame in not making it, (every kid wants to be an astronaut but only a few ever walk on the moon) there was no worse feeling on Earth than being too late.

Winter 1993. Eleven years, three colleges, three college tennis programs, and I was right back where I started at UCLA, yet barely halfway done with my schooling. First day back to school, walking the campus, my head was spinning about all that'd transpired and what might have been. Anxious, chain smoking, pounding cups of coffee and diet coke, anything to help me pass the moment.

Strolling among the beautiful red brick buildings, I passed the massive libraries, wondering where I'd be if I spent more time in them. Continuing to walk, I passed the Psychology Building, the same stairs I walked up 8 years ago, the same hall I walked down not feeling right, the first time I ever told on myself that all was not right with my mind. Eight long years ago, though it felt like a lifetime  If I'd only called that number.

Back at school, I feel like I was starting over, and in lieu of my prior grades, maybe that was good. I choose an entirely new major. Political Science, with an emphasis on Theory. Could a degree be more worthless in my workaday world? But I didn't care. I just wanted to finish school and not be a college drop out anymore. 

At my first class. With my new sober-fueled anxiety, I was compulsively early for everything. Better than being late I guess. But I was uncomfortable in every way. Ten years these kids senior, I was once them. If I could only go back. A youth wasted on getting wasted. 

The class was massive. Four hundred of us in a theater and people continued to spill in. The Professor finally arrived. Tall, rangy, jean jacket. As he walked past me, I saw a giant Grateful Dead patch on the back of his coat with an acoustic guitar slung over his arm. Reaching the front of the room, he greeted us, took out his guitar and proceeded to belt out Bob Dylan's Desolation Row without missing a word, (for I knew them all myself.) And a feeling of calm swept over me. I was in the hands of a kindred spirit. His name was Eugene Victor Wolffenstein. I would take a class with Victor every one of my five remaining quarters at UCLA. He became my intellectual guidepost to this crazy world we live. He also became the mentor I always wanted. Even more, he became a friend.

After class, I went by the tennis courts to check out practice. The once charming Sunset Canyon courts of my playing days had been replaced by the vacuous and ungodly sterile UCLA stadium where the 1984 Olympics were held. I took a seat on one of the metal bleachers as I watched the activities unfold before me. Off in a distant corner, I saw Coach Bassett cajoling the kids just like he did myself many years ago. The same encouragements, the same cadence. If it's not broken...

Coach, head down and focused, started working his way over toward myself. As he approached, he glanced up to where I was sitting. As our eyes met, I tentatively greeted him with a "Hey Coach" to which he shot back enthusiastically in his pat monotone response "Haaaaaaaaayy. Who is that guy? How you doing Barry?"  

And as he put his head back down to return to practice, he quickly pivoted back in my direction and before I even had a chance to respond to his greeting said "Hey, never should have lost that match to Grabb back then"..to which he turned away, returning to coach his team.

Ten years later, and that moment against Grabb and Stanford forever etched on his mind. I quit on Coach, and he never forgot it...

A short walk from the courts, I arrived at Ackerman Union. Supposedly there was an AA meeting on the top floor in the back corner. But there would be no sign. The Anonymous part. I arrived early again. It was my new thing. Anxious and compulsively 15 minutes early.  I walked in to the empty room and took a seat. Ten minutes later, in walked Jim Hilman, the head of SoCal junior tennis for decades, the same gentleman who came on my court in Long Beach during my break down ten years ago. As our eyes met, we both started laughing. He approached, giving me a huge hug, before saying " I knew you were fucked up Buss, but I didn't know you were this fucked up."

Oh yeah Mr. Hilman, I'm this fucked up...

First day back at school winding down, I cruised in to Westwood. Back in the day, I used to love the Village, spent every free minute there. Baxters 2 for 1 night, Strattons Long Island Iced Teas, Yesterdays and the Chart House, Stan's Doughnuts, NY Pizza and Fatburger when they called closing time. So decadent. Yet the place I once loved now haunted me. I now feared the place. I immediately sensed this was no place for a sober person. 

Yet I kept poking around. All my favorite joints were boarded up now, replaced by the latest trendy spots. All those memorable nights of years ago, they were gone now. As I continued to walk, every turned corner spawned a memory, with few of them good.  Westwood village. Fraternity row. All the dark corners of campus. Westwood. It was so fresh and exciting back in the day, now it looked tired and worn down, not all that unlike myself. 

I started getting the feeling I shouldn't be in Westwood, my haunting past confronting me at every turn, following me around, nipping at my heels. Everywhere I looked my thoughts raced to a place in time, to what was and what could have been and how badly I fucked it up. I walked past the alleys where the drugs were bought and sold. All the hooks ups and late nights. Maybe I should have gone to another school, a place less haunting. But I was enrolled at UCLA again. No more running, no more evading. Just get it done

And I did. I hurried through the next couple years. Applying myself, I made Deans list several quarters running. Then Graduation Day arrived. What should have been a proud moment, getting a degree from a college the status of UCLA passed unceremoniously. I didn't attend my Graduation. My parents barely acknowledged. It was all so bittersweet. What started with so much promise at eighteen, finished with so little fanfare at twenty-nine. 

 

But I finished. Upon graduation, I landed the sweet country club teaching job. Coaching full time now, I hooked in with some WTA players all the while developing a bull pen of solid juniors. Still young and playing well, I finally became a coach in demand. And with the job came the car and the house and the beautiful girlfriend, all the material things, the outside stuff, just like they promised in program. I was staying clean and sober. It was a good life.

And the inside stuff. I was doing the drill and working a program, attending meetings regularly, experiencing the promises as laid out in the Big Book. Working the 12 steps. I got to the 9th. I made direct amends whenever possible. I started paying people back. All of them. In every way. In the process I learned  if I met you. I owed you, for I took something from everybody I ever crossed paths with, if not money, more important things, like trust and love. 

My personal transformation was real. I started to see that people who avoided me in the past did so, not because they didn't care about me, but quite the opposite, that it was painful to care about me when I was bent of self-destruction, for there was nothing anybody could do to help me. So they withdrew, not completely, but to a safe distance for themselves. And the best gift from being sober was getting these people back in my life, for in sobriety, it became safe for people to care about me again. 

People saw me change, not the least being my parents. They started to celebrate my sobriety birthdays with me. One year, two years, three and four. Sundays became family day. After a particular vibrant night of conversation and good will, my father got emotional at the dinner table. He looked across the table at me and said he  couldn't believe what he was seeing. That I'd become a completely different person. And how proud they were of me. 

You could have knocked me over with a feather...

But not all was well in my inner world. Those years of 1996 and 1997 would be the high water marks of my early recovery, for that glorious wave of early sobriety was soon to come crashing down.

In spite of my commitment to sobriety and the AA way, I began to struggle with the program. Not all that unlike addiction, recovery began to take over my life. I began to see the world through the prism of the 12 steps of Alcoholic Anonymous. Every behavior analyzed, every action micro-managed. What was a character defect, what was in need of inventory. The work I was doing on myself,  the oppressive and constant cleaning of house. Obsessing over my every word and action. The work. Do the work. Do the work or die. To idle was to fall behind. Alcoholism was waiting for you. Doing push-ups. Getting stronger. Waiting for me to let up. It all began to feel so neurotic. Like somehow I wasn't doing it right, that I should have been feeling different or better. Seemed everyone around me had a deeper spiritual connection to a Higher Power and program than myself. How much more work could I do?

So I took some steps away. I saw too many people living their lives in recovery, living frightened within the confines of AA meetings. And that wasn't me. I was going to AA so I could live life fully on the outside, with confidence and assurance and sober. And with my new lease on life, I started hitting the town. Seeing live music. Chasing Phish and all the other jambands. Hitting every club on the Sunset Strip, the mid 90's, the dawn of alternative indie music. Every night there were three shows to choose from. The Troubadour, the Whiskey, The Roxy, The Knitting Factory, Spaceland, The House of Blues. Several nights a week, the Sunset Strip became my new spiritual getaway. Yet I would always explore alone.  An urban mystic, I was the most unhip hipster you'd ever seen.

For a while I was pulling it off. Against all program advice, I was living this double life. And with each successful adventure, I began to feel more bulletproof. Summer of 97. Two of my closest friends have back to back bachelor parties in Lake Tahoe. I cavort around Tahoe two weeks straight with ten of my best friends from college. It was an insane amount of fun. But as I drove away, I recalled feeling different. That maybe I wasn't as bullet proof as I thought.

For as much fun as I had, they were having more fun. And it didn't devolve in to late night drug binges and self-destructive behavior. Just a bunch of hilarious guys drinking beer becoming even more hilarious. And though it didn't make me want to drink, it didn't make me want to run back to AA and its neurotic over-processing of every micro-detail of life. All to keep my already tidy side of the street somehow tidier. 

My connection to program began to suffer. I wasn't feeling it anymore and I missed having fun. I missed the levity of party people. My struggles with program begin to manifest. My sponsor and I started fighting. My willingness to accept direction became near non-existent. I stopped making time for my sponsees. I started missing my commitments and leaving meetings early. All of a sudden I started feeling alienated in the rooms of Alcoholic Anonymous.

I began to question everything. Possessed with an unforgiving intellectual conscience, the religiosity of AA became a point of contention for me. Too much Sunday in my AA. Before, I was able to shelf my concerns, for the positives of sobriety so outweighed the negative. But I could no longer hide my discomfort with program and its dependence on the irrational and incomprehensible. 

My alienation mounting, I sought out other programs. I attended Secular Sobriety, Rational Recovery, AA for Atheists. I started reading voraciously again, becoming obsessed with the naturalistic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. I started intensive therapy, trading in my AA chair for the counselor's couch. I went so far as enrolling in graduate school for Political Theory, hoping to find the meaning of life in the pages of a book. Losing my grasp, I tried everything and anything to find a higher connection to the world I lived.

Feeling so out of place at AA, I stopped going to meetings altogether, not remembering the most important lesson ever taught in AA., that the worst thing about not going to meetings is you don't get to hear what happens to people who stop going to meetings. 

Then one night. Long couple days on the courts. Wiped out. Hadn't eaten. Friends asked me to stop by a bar to watch the Lakers game. I popped in. It was packed, it was loud. Looking for a seat, there was nothing. Looking for my friends, I couldn't locate them. Mashed in the crowd, I heard my name yelled from across the room. It was a table of old party friends I hadn't seen in ages. They called me over. They had a chair. Wrong kind of chair. High fives, fist bumps, and all sorts of jiving greeted me. And as I sat, there would be no opening prayer. And in all the excitement I was handed a glass. And it was full of beer. And the bar was loud, and the energy was crazy and in the flash of a second I raised the glass to my mouth and without a single thought in the world, beer was flowing down my throat and my 4 years of sobriety with it, all for a cheap glass of shitty beer in a dive bar with people I hadn't seen in years. 

And for what?

And one led to two and then a couple more, but I made it through the night without any further escalation. But when I awoke the next morning, I realized I'd made a terrible, terrible mistake. A month away from 5 years of sobriety and I'd thrown it all away. 

Now what was I going to do..

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 30: You can get there from here..

March 9th, 2022 

Its late in the evening. My house is dark. I sit alone at my desk typing you these words. Tomorrow will be ten years since that fateful night with Trey Anastasio and the LA Philharmonic. I was overcome with emotion that evening seeing my rock and roll idol performing clean and sober upon the stage, sparking a long dormant flame within me that maybe I could try sobriety one more time. Sobriety and I, two ships who'd long since passed in the night. Yet, when I finish typing these final words and lay my head to bed to end this day, I will awaken tomorrow, March 10th 2022, celebrating 10 years of consecutive sobriety. 

Apparently I had one more miracle in me...

How'd I do it? Certainly not the conventional way. I mean, why start now? After the concert, I checked in to a sober living house, beginning a challenging detox as I bounced from one grim low bottom house to another throughout the South Bay. And as bleak as those homes were, they were a step up in living conditions considering where I was with my life. I'd done some serious damage to myself, something you only find out when you finally try and stop. It was all hard, but so was trying to live as a functioning addict haplessly strung out on drugs. None of it was pretty, but I sucked it up, going through what I had to go through, knowing there are no style points awarded in the process of getting clean.

I emerged from the withdrawals and detoxification phase about as well as could be expected, with no permanent lasting damage, giving me a sliver of a chance to move forward with my life taking only the babiest of steps. For as hard as getting sober was, living sober was where I struggled most. I had tried everything multiple times. What could I do differently to give me the best chance this time?

So I concocted another plan. That's what addicts do. We plan. The old cycle of fuck up, sober up, clean up, speed up, fuck up even worse had to be broken. It was the story of my adult life. Rinse repeat, always playing catch up, always trying to make up for lost time. But this time I vowed to try the polar opposite. I decided to rejoin the stream of life slowly. And I mean real slowly. I felt the need to control every moment of my recovery, so much so I moved out of the chaotic sober living carousel in to an extended stay hotel. Just me, myself and a dingy corner room at the Moonlite Inn on Pacific Coast Highway in the heart of my hometown of Redondo Beach.

And I made that hotel room my sanctuary. The hotel was two blocks from the Alta Vista tennis courts where I still taught my tennis, a perfect distance for me and my bike. And I settled in to that little room, stay in-determinant, drawing the tightest of circles around my slowly resurgent life. I would only leave that room to teach my lessons, either picking up take out on the way home or having my food delivered to the door. Afraid of my own shadow, this was the only way I could conceive of staying sober. I wasn't coming out until I knew was safe, an indefinite self-imposed draconian house arrest, length of incarceration yet to be determined.

Normally, an addict of my type alone in a hotel room was with the worst of company. The isolation and lack of accountability were perfect set ups for my darkest impulses. But I tried a different approach to getting sober this time. 

The year was 2012. Facebook and other social media platforms were just hitting their stride. And what I did was I told on myself again. I went very public with my personal struggles with alcoholism and addiction and more importantly, that I was trying to get sober again, sending the clear message to all in my orbit that under no circumstances was it ok for anybody to ever have a drink with me again.

A Hail Mary for sure. My friends all pretty much rolled their eyes; they'd heard me swear off everything a 1000 times only to relapse days later. Yet somehow, in its banal simplicity, it worked. I started putting a little time together. I got myself another sobriety date, vowing March 10th to be my last and final one. And though still riddled with anxiety within the the cycles of my manic/depression, I was managing to stay sober. 

I think back now on those early hotel days, coming home at the end of my day to that crappy little room. And after locking the door behind how there was no safer feeling in my new world, for I wasn't coming out again til morning, which meant I'd made it through another 24 hours clean and sober.

And though I didn't trust anything about myself or my new found sobriety, little by little, day by day, I was starting to put some time together. At times I'd have to pinch myself, was I really staying sober?  After 30 plus years of certifiable crazy, the incessant obsession to destroy myself was finally lifting. And a confidence in me began emerge. I'd found my own successful formula for achieving sobriety, sensing if I could continue to do exactly what I was doing and nothing else, I might just be alright. 

And the miraculous accomplishment of not doing something finally registered within me...

The goal of every person in recovery is to achieve long term sobriety. Logically, one could lock themselves in a room forever, never coming out nor drinking ever again. But at some point you need to live life, you need to come out of your room. My isolating ways were an anathema to recovery's communal principles. But I didn't stop there. I swore off everything and everybody associated with my past struggles. This meant dating, competing at tennis, attending concerts, going to AA meetings, reading Nietzsche, and most of all engaging with my family. Been there, done all that, a couple thousand times. But I needed something to help guide my every day. What would it be?

I ventured to the internet. During my scrolling, I came across a gentleman named Dr. Martin Seligmann. He was the lead researcher in the breaking new field of Positive Psychology. My experience with traditional psychology was it looked backwards toward the past and all its conflicts. The thought of spending one more moment wallowing in my past was harrowing. What Seligmann proposed was to put the past aside and focus on the present. Positive psychology entailed identifying and applying our 5-10 best qualities and practicing these principles all day every day, in all our affairs if I may.

For me, positive psychology was a perfect fit. Be a good friend, be a good listener, be positive, be generous, be inspiring, be appreciative. The formula was simple, practice these principles in all my affairs, trying to win each day. In the process of winning day after day, I began building a reserve of positivity that if/when bad things happened (and of course they would) they would only chip away at my copious reserves of positivity built up day after day practicing Seligmann's principles

Social Media became ideal for implementation. How simple it was to share harmless vignettes of my life to a supportive growing ensemble of contacts, all the while supporting their endeavors, building an endless algorithm of positivity. Again, I'd tried and failed at everything else. What did I have to lose?

But what to do about my mood swings? I needed a place to focus my energy. So I started a blog, a platform to house my endless journaling. In September of 2012, at about 6 months of sobriety, still living in the hotel, I started writing random tennis stories from my youth, posting them on Facebook to a surprisingly robust response. After a week of furious daily production, the idea of writing a junior tennis memoir appeared. And I would write said memoir in a mere 30 days to an enthusiastic response, though the book's quality suffered editorially, as books do that are written in a month.

But in the process, I had finally found a healthy place to deposit my manic obsessive energy. Writing. And writing is something I've done nearly every morning since, creating a vast expansive oeuvre of work, high on quantity, wishing I'd spent more time on the quality, always too quickly off chasing the next idea before polishing the prior. But writing became my medicine, the instrument by which I could finally calm my mind. Its as important to my well-being as breathing. I cling to it so.

Then on January 29th, 2014, I got an email. It was from my Mom. The title said Sad News. Important. Call. ((INSERT email and death notice))

I got on the phone immediately. My Mom was upset and talking quickly. Within her spree of words she said my Father had passed, that he'd died a couple months ago, and that she was sorry she hadn't told me earlier but she'd been in a terrible way.

And a wave of confusion crashed upon me. My Dad had been dead for two months, but no one in my family, not my Mom or my two brothers felt it important enough to inform me. I knew our family was a mess but did we have to be this fucked up?

But of course there would be nothing normal about my Dad's passing. I mean, why start now?

And I think back on that moment talking on the phone to my Mom and what if I wasn't sober, how would I have reacted? I'm certain I would have been indignant and dramatic in my feeling victimized again. 

But I was sober. And the promises of the AA program came back to me. I intuitively knew how to handle a situation that in years past would have baffled me. 

My connection to my family was terribly broken. We needed to make this our bottom and stop digging.

And my family's terms of endearment began that day with my father's passing...

After hanging up with my Mom, I drove the one mile to my parents house, parents I hadn't seen or spoken to in years and entered the house of my youth, greeting my mourning mother with a tentative hug. And we sat down at the dinner table together, the same table I'd sat my whole life in such varied states of disarray, and so began my first meaningful conversation with my mother at the ripe old age of 49. 

It was a tough day, hearing the details of his passing. His last couple years had been quite difficult. Acute arthritis, double hip replacement surgery only to be felled by cancer. He would pass away in the living room of our home with only my Mother present. 

With the image of his final moments seared to my psyche, questions raced through my mind. What were his final words? And did he say anything about me? 

And I thought of asking my Mom. Then I thought better of it... unsure if I could have handled the heartbreak of not hearing the answers I wanted to hear.

Over the course of the next couple years, I finally got to know my Mom. And its turned out great; She's such a neat lady. Sweet, funny, witty, the light still very on. Where was this person through all my formative years? 

Then the bad news continued. My mother got her first of two cancer diagnoses, with myself eventually coming back home to live with her while she convalesced.

And over the next few years my brothers and I would rally around my Mom as she recovered, with all of us convening in Torrance for the Christmas holiday, doing the best we could to rebuild the jagged remains of our once broken family. And we all did the best we could, putting past resentments aside if not to rest, united we became in our care for Mom.

On Christmas Day, we had a ritual. We would all pile in to Mom's car to go to the Rose Hills Cemetery in Whittier to put a flower on my Dad's grave. We would drive the 45 minutes out in silence, mull around the mortuary for 15-20 minutes or so, take a family picture, then drive home in silence. And we did this several years running, yet in all the years of us doing this, we never talked about my Dad. Not once. No happy reminiscing, no funny stories about Dad and his ways. Four people all deeply affected by this man in our own respective ways, he was the one thing we had in common, yet we never talked about him.

Uneasy with this, I had made the decision to start talking about him, hopefully at our next Christmas together. But then tragedy struck again. My younger brother Jerry, a teacher in Kansas City for the past 25 years, died suddenly of a heart attack at 53. And so began a very somber stretch for our family. With Covid raging, my older brother and I took care of Jerry's affairs, but my Mom, unable to travel, suffered the loss of your youngest son all alone at her home.

In the writing of this book, I had many questions about my past I wanted to ask my Mom about. But I opted not to. My Mom's been through enough. It was time to let the painful parts of our past be.

Professionally, I bounced around a bit, eventually landing in Nashville, TN in 2018 to develop a new junior tennis academy. It was a bold move. Being new in town and knowing all of two people, I did what all middle aged single people do. I went to the app store on my I-Phone and downloaded a dating site.

Fortunately for me, a lovely spirited woman from Iowa just happened to have relocated to Nashville about the same time I did and she downloaded the same app. And as our profiles appeared to one another, we both swiped right, resulting in a dinner date.

On one of our first dates she came over to watch the final of the US Open. Turned out, she didn't know the first thing about tennis, had no idea who Roger Federer or Serena Williams were. Well she does now.

On another of our early dates, I took her to Ascend Amphitheater in Nashville to see Phish perform. During one of their longer spacier jams, she leaned over and asked me if I lost a lot of sleep wondering why I was single if I took my dates to hear such music.

And we shared a hearty laugh that night... 

Its been said in recovery if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Well, on September 10th, 2021, I married that woman. And her awesome 4 kids and our two dogs and a beautiful grand-baby with likely ten more to come. I'm no longer an unfit parent. I'm finally safe to love. Nothing in this life has ever felt better.

All my life, I've been a hippy jock from the beaches of California with politics often to the left of Karl Marx. But today I live in Franklin Tennessee, one the reddest districts in all the land with my wife Twyla, a Republican from Iowa and we listen to country music all day all the while living an hour from Alabama. How the hell did that ever happen? I'm an addict. I'm a planner. Its what I do. I couldn't have planned this in a million years.

But I have a tight family now, something I've always wanted more than words could tell. And I think back on my time at Sierra Tucson where I was deemed an unfit parent before ever becoming one. Now I have 4 beautiful step children who buy me gifts for Father's Day an introduce me as their Dad. And if you'd have told me at some of the lower points in my life that someday I'd have ten years of sobriety with a wife and kids and dogs surrounded by love all day every day, I'd have told you you can't get there from here. Well, you can..

You can get there from here..

In my desire to wrap up all the loose ends of my life for this book, I thought of re-engaging tennis one more time. To maybe work real hard, get in great shape and get some closure from this maddening sport. But that would have been more of the same grandiosity I've spent the past 10 years healing from. I don't need to do anything grandiose. And even if I did, its not going to make a difference in my life or make me special. My greatest victory in tennis is to finally be able to let it all go, to no longer need anything from it. 

To once again, just let it be...

For tennis provided too many highs and lows, something I need to be constantly on guard against. Today I manage my Bipolar by living the most controlled existence. I take no medications to manage it nor will I ever. I've learned to modify my daily routines to such a degree I've all but eliminated the swings in mood that came with being too active.

I'm in bed by 1030 religiously, I nap every day. I'm awake at first light to write. I am obscenely disciplined, often to a fault. I've created an invisible bubble around myself, staying safely in my lane with guard rails all around. It may make me more self-absorbed than any normal person should be, the constant micro-managing of the self can be all encompassing. But I must always be checking my moods. My energy, my pacing, striving for balance between work, rest, and play. What it lacks in spontaneity in more than makes up for in sanity. For I no longer have any margin for error. My daily rituals have become as important to my survival as my breathing.

As Winston Churchill once said, if you're going through hell, keep going...

Well I did, and I got through it. And I refuse to risk anything to pull me back down, though don't think for one second my mind doesn't go there. Every time I have a good day hitting the ball, I start thinking about playing tournaments. When Phish announces their tours, I'm immediately plotting out how to go on the road for a week. But then I come to my senses. Maybe I'll see Phish if they pass through town. Maybe not. Today, I do couch tour, watching the shows online from my living room, and I dance like nobody's watching, because they aren't. Its safer that way. I can't afford life's highs anymore. Playing a tennis tournament would be no different.

Which leaves me my Father. 

People hurt each other often by having different needs. And most people aren't very graceful about not getting their needs met when and how they want them met.

 

So shots got landed, with both of us winning some rounds. But after all the shouting was over, if you went to the judges score cards, there would be no arms raised or winner crowned. We both lost far more than we ever bargained for.

 

And all the uncertainties of life played out in my struggles, partly because he shared so little about himself with me. He never discussed what kinds of problems he wrestled with or how he felt or what it meant to be a man. So I had to figure it all out for myself and only now do I have any sense of what is right. My Dad's way of raising my brothers and I left us all saddled with fear, weakness and a general feeling of self-contempt. And as my life has unfolded, I've had to sort through those feelings all by myself. 

 

And that's where abandonment comes in. Mostly painted as abuse, it can also be an opportunity, to have to navigate one's way through life all alone. The faster you embrace your fate, the quicker a course of action gets made. For nobody is coming to save you when you're abandoned. That's the whole point, your provider's are incapable of protecting you. Its a dangerous life, the fear can cripple you. Certainly fertile soil for a growing array of neuroses. If your parents can discard you, why ever trust another human being?

 

I wanted my Dad so badly to protect me, but was that ever a possibility? I wanted him to protect me from myself, from my self-destructive impulses. I wanted him to save me from the scourge of addiction. No small order, to save another from self-destruction. Yet I lived with the burden of not being able to forgive my parent's for being so oblivious about my alcoholism that was so deeply impactful to my life. 

 

And if my Dad could see me now, could we hash it out? Could we have an honest father-son exchange? What if it failed completely? What if he denied my reality of past events? Could we have accepted each other's version of the past?

 

I'd liked to think I could, for I truly am an entirely different person today. And I would lean on my Recovery. 

 

Sobriety, my Northern Star, guide me this one last time..

 

And in the final tally, man is a hero and man is a villain and somewhere in all the idealizing and demonizing and the black and white of youth a nuanced grey appears, that he was just a man doing the best he could with the limited tools he had.

 

And I reached that conclusion through my recovery. I've healed the broken parts of myself and I'm proud to wear that Scarlet Letter. A giant H for Healed. 

For my life was spared by an Amazing Grace. As I sit here on the eve of ten years of sobriety, at once amazed I could stay sober a day, now mesmerized I ever lived the way I did. And I reflect back on the myriad of fellow sufferers I crossed paths with over the years. Were they rescued? Did they find their Eskimo? Were they blessed with a miracle? Were there saints in their lives saving them too? 

 

I can only pray that they too were gifted the grace of sobriety and sanity like I've been..

 

Because it can happen. We do get better. No matter how hopeless we may feel, you can get there from here, you can have the life you always dreamed having. My sitting here typing you these final words is living proof of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 29 An Evening With Trey

Consumed in a shroud of shame, I was whisked home to the South Bay, feeling a pariah in the only home I knew. This wasn't partying too much, this was a serious attempt on my life. But how much did they know? Only Gayle fully knew and she wouldn't tell a soul. But I knew. And I knew they knew something went terribly wrong with me. 

Being the bullshitter I was (the survival skills one learns along the way) I manipulated my way back in to my client's good graces, eliciting compassion and sympathy with my stock answer, that I had another  adverse reaction to my medications. It was all I could do. And within no time, all was forgiven if not forgotten. I still had my job. I still had my clients. Lets get back to fixing backhands. Same time next week?

Seriously in debt now, I tried to make up for lost time, scheduling as much work as much as I could. Playing catch up was always a trap for me. I'd fuck up, sober up, speed up, then fuck up some more. Rinse repeat. Incapable of doing life with anything resembling balance. Barely getting through my days, at night I tried to attend meetings. But I was rattled. The meetings were too much reality, a reality I had no idea how to process as I walked around in a low grade state of shock from the shame and the pain. The things we carry.

For what had I done to myself?

Desperate, I thought of calling my parents. They knew nothing of what happened in Denver or of my Bipolar Diagnosis. The hospital didn't reach out to them and Gayle kept quiet too. I felt I should tell them, that they should know their son was in trouble. But I couldn't. It'd be too much for them. And it'd be too much for me too. And just like my tennis and my alcoholism, Bipolar disorder was going to be my problem to figure it out alone.

Within weeks, I was right back at it, strung out on meth and heading for trouble. The pull of crystal on my mind, so far beyond my ability to refrain. And the rapid cycling began again . Up for days, down for days. The fever of the mania, the darkness of my depressions. 

Again, I began to see no way out. I didn't want to go on, I couldn't go on. So I concocted another plan. Not a very good one though. Turned out I was a bit of a pussy. I didn't like pain or violence, to myself or others. I just wanted to go to sleep and never wake up.  . 

Prepared to put my plan in to action, one dark night in Hermosa Beach, wearing every piece of clothing I could, I loaded up on every drug and medicine I could find. At the end of Hermosa pier, I strapped heavy weights to my arms and legs. And I took one last long sad walk to the end of the pier and dove in, hoping to pass out and drown and sink quietly and softly from this life. 

The problem was I still had meth in my system, its powerful stimulating effects overriding all. Within minutes, I was seen. And help was on the way. Trying to drown myself, but the first responders had other ideas, swimming toward me with all their might. Starting to fade, I should have passed out already. But the meth, it wouldn't let me. The drug that had been killing me was saving my life. 

Reached at the last second, I was rushed to the Harbor UCLA ICU where I lost consciousness soon after. Unconscious for days, when I came to, Gayle was there. She had filled the staff in about my Denver suicide attempt which was only two months ago. And there would be no talking my way out of this predicament. It was 5150 time. Transported to the lock down wing of the Harbor-UCLA Psych ward, I was now at the mercy of the state. They would be the ones to decide if or when I got released.

I was officially certified now. I was a psycho. Sampras was right all along.

In the ward, the days were long. This was a beat down crowd and I was being treated so. The kid gloves were off, the staff aggressive, confrontational. I had fucked up and they were letting me know it. Passing time, they asked if I'd like to participate in some workshops. We all sat in a circle. It felt like kindergarten all over again. Instead of asking what I wanted to be when I grew up, they asked us what we looked forward to the most upon our release. The nurse went around the circle, with most patient's answers scattershot. I was among patients with minimal faculties, but there was a lady next to me, eager to share her answer. She'd written it down and could barely wait her turn. As the circle reached her, she stared down at her answers, telling the group all she wanted was her Momma's lima beans. In increasingly hushed tones, she kept repeating the answer, at the end just mouthing the words. 

My momma's lima beans...My momma's lima beans. 

And I got it. Life had gotten away from her too. She wanted her innocence back, to her childhood home and her Momma's cooking. To the safety of her youth, to how her life once was. 

But she had more hope than myself. As the circle worked its way back toward myself, I looked down at my blank pad, for I'd written nothing...

I couldn't even envision a better life for myself. All I wanted was for it to end...

I was in the Psych ward a week before being let out. Upon release, I went straight to round 3 of inpatient treatment, this time to the Pasadena Recovery Center (PRC), where the show Celebrity Rehab was filmed. PRC advertised itself as a dual diagnosis facility, treating addiction and mental illness concurrently. In reality, it was a total scam. Insurance companies were pretty much done paying the obscene rates for 30 day inpatient rehabs like Sierra Tucson and Betty Ford. But they would cover hospital stays if mental health issues were involved. So PRC exploited that loophole, yet PRC offered no mental health services whatsoever. It was an insurance fraud racket right from the start just waiting to be exposed.

Released in the summer of 2004, I wasn't out more than a few weeks before I was right back on the meth. So enslaved I'd become to its seductive pull. It had overtaken my body and mind, I simply couldn't stay away. Once again, in a sleepless delirium, I ended up in Las Vegas with every intention of ending my life once and for all. But this time I wouldn't be found. I was heading for Hoover Dam, to simply jump my way from the world.

On my way to the dam, I got pulled over for a traffic stop. An expired license plate tag. They ran a background check on me. I had a bounced check to a casino. That was a felony in Nevada. The police searched my car. They saw immediately what I was up to, taking me straight to Clark County jail. The irresponsibility destroying my life had just saved my life. Oh the irony.

Jail was a madhouse. I wouldn't have survived 5 minutes in there. But they put me in a cell on suicide watch with nothing. No sheets, no blanket. Nothing. Just a mattress and a pillow, for once again, I was a danger to myself.

Gayle and Bobby drove all night from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to rescue me again. On our way home, they tried to drop me back at the UCLA Psych ward, but there was no room. Bodies lay on the ground blocking the entrance way door. I begged them to take me home, agreeing to try treatment again. Against their own best judgement, they acquiesced.

Inpatient Round 4. The Bimini, a free center near downtown Los Angeles. There was a pattern to my inpatient facilities and it wasn't upward. I lasted a week before checking myself out, vowing to my inner circle to do better.

But crystal meth owned me. I was possessed, feeling like my mind had been hijacked by evil spirits. I felt like the famed Houdini, wrapped in chains and locks, yet I had no hidden key. And the debate that used to rage in my mind, to get high or not to get high. I didn't win that debate often, but at least part of me was still trying. But now there was no debate. I had to have my meth. No matter what, no matter how.

Early 2005. My stability deteriorating, I was determined to take my life again but this time to never be found. No more first responder saviors, no more ocean rescues, no divine police intervention. I would find the most barren place I could. And I did. On the 5 freeway North, deep within The San Jouquin Valley, a hundred miles North of Los Angeles. On the outskirts of nowhere, I pulled over in Buttonwillow California. I drove deep in to a farm where at sunset I took another lethal dose of medications and narcotics and lied down beneath my car once again to peacefully pass from this world.

Days later, my eyes slowly opened. I was in another hospital, but this time in great pain. The left side of my face was fractured. My jaw, my cheek, the orbital bone around my eye, so much so I couldn't move my face. The attending nurses approached, seeing me awaken. I asked where I was. They informed I was in a hospital and that I'd been in a coma for 5 days. I was still alive. If I'd only taped an advanced directive to my chest. 

Another failed suicide attempt. Coming in and out of consciousness, the first emotion I remembered feeling was being highly disappointed. I so didn't want to continue on like this. 

The nurse, seeing me coming to, approached my bed to ask me some questions. She started with the softballs.

 Do you know your name? How old are you? Where do you live?

Then the stumpers began.. 

Do you know where you are?' Do you know why you’re here? Do you know what happened to you? 

And I could only shake my head no. 

Then she started in. I was in a car accident, I was air-lifted by helicopter to the hospital trauma unit. I had a broken eye, cheek, jaw and several ribs and that I'd been comatose for 5 days, being kept alive by life support. 

I fell into shock. I just wanted to die, not be crippled. This was not how I wanted this to play out.  I didn't want to be there, I didn’t want to be anywhere. 

Please, somebody deliver me relief from my hopeless state of body and mind..

But like it or not, here I was again. Alive. Now what? A plethora of emotions swarmed me as I gently  drifted off again, to another soft extended sleep, duration unknown, knowing that upon my arising, I had some serious shit to straighten out.  

Within days, I was feeling better. But they were not letting me out and nobody would answer my questions. Turned out the state was looking to have me committed full time, to a permanent bed in  California's psychiatric system. And who could blame them. But the bed never opened. And after 10 days they couldn't keep me any longer, eventually releasing me to Gayle once again.

But I wasn't done with Buttonwillow yet. I was being charged with all sorts of stuff. DWI and destruction of property. Apparently I got in my car and started driving, passing out along the way, taking out a PG&E power poll in the process. The collision was violent, the air bag breaking the left side of my body, but it undoubtedly saved my life. Worse yet, the police report told a daunting story. I'd crossed over in to oncoming traffic before crashing. I could have hurt innocent people. Did I do it on purpose?

Days later, I returned to Buttonwillow with my friend Dan to retrieve my belongings from my towed and battered car. I arrived to the tow yard early, looking through the chain link fence with razor wire atop, trying to locate my car. The junk yard dogs scared me away, but not before seeing off in the distance my Ford Explorer, badly wrecked, sandwiched between two burned out and ruined vehicles.

A tow truck driver soon arrived to let me in, parking across the lot from our car. The driver got out and began fumbling through his pockets for the right key to open the gate. But in the process, he began staring my way, his eyes locked on to me as a look of shocked bewilderment spread across his face.

In no mood, I asked if there was a problem. His stare, still locked on to me magnetically, intensified as he closed the gap between us. It was not the stare of a long lost friend. Something was up here, so much so I interjected.. “Is everything OK?”

The driver stopped in his tracks, pointing right at me..."Is that you? I can not believe my eyes..shit..no way..can't be...no.." ..

"Umm, have we met before? I'm not from around these parts".. I respectfully responded.

"Oh, I know me that...I come up on you last week...you were the guy in the Silver Ford..My God..look at you....I done thought you were a goner...oh my...the power of prayer I tell you...I come up on you, I didn't even call 911..I just dropped to my knees and prayed for you and your family and I can not believe you're standing in front of me..shit, you were all broken and bloody I was afraid to even touch you..I will BE!!!".. I just can’t believe you’re up and around moving forth as well as you are.” 

Catching on now, I asked "Are you saying you're the person who rescued me last week”  

“Yes sir, you were  pretty bad off, I reckoned you weren’t gonna’ make it. I just can’t believe you’re moving around like you are, looking as good as you do.”

My tow truck driver was seeing a ghost...and it was me.

Getting uncomfortable, I asked if I could retrieve my stuff. Obliging, we entered through the massive sliding metal gate. Passing by him on my way to my car, I felt his urge to touch my shoulder, to prove that what he was seeing was real. As we approached my wreck of a car, my anxiety at the condition of my car was only matched by my desire to get the fuck away from this town as quickly as possible and never return. 

But I had to deal with the tangled mess of metal that was my vehicle. As I got closer, with each approaching step, feelings of nausea and panic mounted as I arrived upon the twisted steel and broken  glass of the car I tried to take my life in but that very likely saved me.

Busted car, busted life, the only difference being my car was totaled,  yet miraculously I was not. As I hurriedly gathered up my stuff, cutting my hands and knees on the thousands of sharp shards of  shattered windshield, emotions swirled within. The last time I exited this vehicle was not under my own power. This time I would walk away under my own power, but not feeling very powerful. Quite the contrary. I hurried from the car back through the compound to my friend and his waiting car. 

Upon passing the tow truck driver, I stopped to thank him for all he'd done for me.

Without acknowledging a word of what I said, he started in ... 

"Ten year old girl died in that car next to yours. Family of four all died in that burned out one to yours left. You got yourselves another mighty lucky chance there mister....promise me you won't end up like them?"

And as I turned to walk away, I made a promise to the man who saved my life, a promise I had no idea how to keep.

Upon arriving home, I settled down for a bit. I was scared straight, for at least a moment. Vowing to do better, but within days my phone was blowing up. Dealers, hookers, dancers, bookies, all stocked up, seeing if I needed anything. 

I'd never realized how important I was to the underground economy...

October 2005. Months passed and I'm struggling again. The meth back in full control. I just can't kick it. I end up in Vegas one more time. I'm blowing it all. Everything was gone. I smoked my car. I lost a boot. How do you lose a boot? My depression raging again, in a black out, I drove my car to an abandoned lot in the hills outside of town. I was going to try again. This time I left voicemails. They were awful. They were tragic. But I didn't know what else to do, the drugs and my mood swings had taken complete control of my life. 

And one last time I slid under my car to hopefully end it all...

But I came to hours later in a bush. With nothing. And extreme carbon monoxide poisoning. I'd been car jacked. They took everything. And beat the shit of me in the process. I'd been kicked, punched,  and robbed, beaten with inches of my life. 

Yet the carjackers, they saved my life...

Staggering through the streets of Henderson, Nevada. Delirious. The police picked me up. I tried to explain to them what happened, but they weren't hearing it, taking me to the city line and dropping me off to fend for myself once again. I staggered for miles through the Las Vegas night, slamming in to light polls, breaking up my face even further. I eventually reached an ER. They admitted me to the ICU, nursing me slowly back to life. 

I was sick and badly beaten, but alive. Maybe we do get more than one miracle..

And one more time, Bobby and Gayle came to rescue me again. Don't even try to tell me there aren't saints in this world. 

And so would end the year 2005. Early the next year, struggling to get back on my feet, the fever of my suicidal ideation that took me to the darkest of places had finally broken. And though I was far from healthy, I wasn't obsessed with harming myself any longer. In spite of every effort to make it back to the clean and sober way, I just couldn't get there It had been a rough stretch; hospitalizations, rehabs,  medications, clinical trials, car crashes, jail, psych wards, comas and a whole lot more more. My life was pure unadulterated chaos. I had lost control.

My inner circle of  friends were at their wits end. After each blow out, there I would stand before them, contrite, humbled, frightened, willing. I would promise to sober up, to change my ways, only to lose my way even worse the next time. 

And early the next year I had what could be called a moment of clarity.

After all the trouble, the drama, the trauma, the near death experiences, the promises to change,  knowing full well every doctor I saw said the same thing, that I wasn't going to make it much longer continuing down this path, that I needed to sober up to have any chance at stabilizing mentally and that my life hung in the balance.

Yet knowing all this, I just couldn’t do it..

But it wasn't from lack of effort. Three thirty day stints in treatment centers, hundreds of hours of psycho-therapy, several psychiatrists, a dozen or so medications, a thousand or so AA meetings, several AA sponsors, several trips to the ER, a couple rounds in the ICU, several brushes with death, hospitals, jails, institutions and the reading of every meaningful book from Nietzsche to the Dalai Lama.

And after all that, after everything I'd put myself and my loved ones through, there I was, in my car, late one night, driving to score drugs one more time...

And it was on that drive it hit me, a moment I recall today with great emotion. A moment where I saw myself for what I had become, an addict, in a purely hopeless state of mind and body. And all I could remember that night was asking myself a question

"How did my life get so far away from me?" 

One more question I could not answer..

But what made that run to score drugs even more memorable was how little resistance I had left. My addiction had taken me over completely, the decision making portion of my id had been taken over in the most hostile of takeovers.  

Helpless and hopeless, I came up with a plan that night that amounted to a life-saving decision. From that moment forward, I decided to live my life as a functioning addict. I know, try not to laugh. But that's how far out of reach sobriety had become. If I had any hope of staying alive, becoming a functioning addict was the best of all my bad options. 

It was simply the best I could do. I really had no other choice...
  

And its was impossible to live as a functioning addict, many around us do it all the time. But at least I had to try. And I did.

And for better or worse it worked. I lived the next 6 years of my life in a haze of narcotics, dysfunction and depression, with some stretches more productive than others. But by the end, my life had turned pretty bleak. I was a mere shell of my former self, spending the last two of those years not inhaling a single sober breath. Not one. In two straight years. 

Then I got a call. It was from my friend Adam. He had an extra ticket to go see Trey Anastasio from Phish. He was performing with the Los Angeles philharmonic orchestra at the beautiful Walt Disney theater in downtown LA

I initially said no. I wasn't feeling it. I couldn't afford it. In reality, I feared being away from my drugs that long. Plus I wouldn't be able to party at the show like I needed to. It was at a concert hall. A fancy one. It would be classical music for hippies 

But Adam insisted, saying we could barter for the ticket, just give him a couple tennis lessons. The day of the show, I was still thinking of opting out, but I gave in. I was off once again to see a show.

I'd been following Trey and Phish since 1992. I'd grown up with him, with Phish, and with the amazing colorful community of loyal fans. I'd never met the man personally, but I always felt I knew him. For he too suffered from the scourge of alcoholism and addiction. During my 20 years of watching him perform, I'd watched him go from clear eyed rock star to a strung out junkie, nearly throwing his life and career away. In 2006, Trey got lucky one night in upstate New York. He got pulled over and arrested with a cache of narcotics he likely would not have survived. Upon being arrested, he thanked the police for saving his life, so beginning his journey in to the world of sobriety.

And there we were again that fateful evening, meeting in the way that we did. Him on stage, myself in my seat. And as the show began, I thought back on some of the lower moments of his life but also how far he'd come. Six years ago his life hung in the balance. Now all cleaned up and sober and rocking a sweet sport coat, Trey took the stage leading the LA Phil through a magical night of composed Phish music. 

How does one get from that car in upstate New York to leading the LA Philharmonic..

As the evening progressed, watching what Trey was pulling off, I was overcome by an emotion I'd never felt before in all my life 

I was overcome with envy. I felt intense envy toward Trey, but not in some delusional sense where I wished I was a famous wealthy rock star. No, the envy was more personal. It was from the sense that we both suffered from the same disease of alcoholism, yet there he was on stage clean and sober, living out his artistic dreams to the fullest. Whereas I so obviously was not. 

And the the emotions hit me hard. So much so, I had to go for a walk to compose myself. Coming back to my seat, the flow of remorse started right back up again. With my head swirling, I recounted all the difficulties I'd experienced living sober.  Yet right before me was somebody who also struggled mightily with sobriety, yet there he was, living clean and sober and with gusto. 

And then Trey strummed his guitar. And so began my favorite Phish song, If I Could, a song I'd never seen performed live before. And with the orchestral strings in full force, the lone harp plucking plaintive notes, Trey and the crowd repeated the songs refrain.

If I could I would, but I don't know how... 

Over and over and over...

And the floodgates opened. I tried to contain myself, but there was no point. I just cried and cried and cried as the song played on. 

If I could, I would...but I don't know how..

But the moment triggered something within me. It had been a long time, over 15 years since I had good strong sobriety, 15 years since my Dad called me a completely different person. It was so long I'd forgot it was even possible. Yet there was Trey right before me simply killing it as a sober man. It was possible. It was right in front of me. And for the first time in a long while, I began to think about my future. Could I get back to the sober life again and live the life I'd always dreamed of?  

It had been 15 long years. Did I have another recovery in me?

My mind went a-racing. Yet the epiphany was I didn't need to figure everything out. I didn't need a master plan. I just needed to do one thing. Try harder. It had been a long time since I seriously committed myself to sobriety. Did I have it in me, Could I try one more time? 

And as we drove home from the show, inspired by the example of one Trey Anastasio, on March 10th 2012, I made a promise to myself.

To try sobriety one more time...

It had been a long time since I'd been clean...Could I get there from here?