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.