Recovery 2 0, p.17
RECOVERY 2.0, page 17
After that relationship I concluded that I was broken. I looked out in the world and saw plenty of people who had “found each other” and seemed to be very happy together, but apparently this was not something I would ever experience.
HOW NOT TO APPROACH A RELATIONSHIP
A few months later, I started to date a girl, but I was determined not to let the same thing happen again. Thus I told her up front that I was not to be counted on for true love. I wanted to spend time with her and be intimate together, but I frankly explained that I was not going to fall in love. Thus I headed down the road toward what would end up being a death-defying relationship filled with all the trappings of codependency, sexual obsession, addiction, manipulation, and dishonesty.
We started to have a lot of fun together, but in the early months of our relationship I was not faithful to her even though I had said that I would be. About a year into our relationship, I was about to make my annual pilgrimage to New Orleans for the Jazz Fest and I plainly told her that I wanted to go without her. I was thinking about some of the flirtations that might happen and that having her with me was not what I wanted. This prompted her to ask me point-blank if I had been faithful since we started dating. I told her the truth. “At the beginning of our relationship, I was with someone else, but that was nearly a year ago.” She was understandably hurt and angry. Strangely, in that instant my connection with her deepened. I could see that she really cared about me and I, too, cared about her. Nonetheless, I headed off to Jazz Fest by myself. Upon landing in New Orleans, though, the most powerful feeling came over me. I missed her and felt I had made a big mistake in not inviting her. I called her to apologize and ask if she would consider flying down. Her distant tone said it all. She would not be flying down to be with me just because I had suddenly seen the light. No. I had shaken her trust to the core, and I would spend the next 18 months in a psychotic tailspin trying to win it and her back. The whole drama was elevated to the next level when I learned that she had started dating another person. We were still seeing each other and the sexual energy remained strong between us, but from that moment forward sex took on a dark quality. It was no longer about love and connection. Now it was more about manipulation and control. I wanted it. She had it and controlled it. And that dynamic created a huge addiction in me. Consequently, I descended into a level of relationship psychosis and sexual obsession that deserves mention.
Each day, I woke up with her on my mind and would begin to scheme my way back into her good graces and into her bed. I’d live with this obsession most of the day and night. It owned me. My friends, meanwhile, started to become concerned. After months of this, many of them told me flat out, “Tommy, we can’t hear any more of this. You simply have to stop talking about her. Whatever it is you need, we don’t have the answer.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t stay away from her in my mind. On a daily basis, I was consumed by jealousy, fear, and sexual thoughts of her. I could not be with any other woman, didn’t think about any other woman. She was the only woman in the world as far as I was concerned.
I started to fear for my own sanity. My ego was taking a beating. I felt guilty and shameful. It was like any other addiction I had ever known, but even more intense. There was a substance, in this case a person to whom I had become addicted. I felt I could not live without her and refused to let go even though the consequences of hanging on were considerable. I had built up an addiction story around her. “She’s the only one. This has to work. I’ve caused this whole mess. It’s all my fault and I’ve got to fix it.” Those were the hooks. I was swimming in the Frequency of Addiction and it was slowly draining me of life force.
All this time I was attending 12-Step meetings and working the steps to the best of my ability, but it was obvious to me and just about everyone else that something was wrong. Would I need medication? Was this a depression? I had never experienced anything quite like it before. The thoughts were upon me before I opened my eyes each morning. Drugs and alcohol had been removed from my life and my thinking had changed. Now I had no desire to use drugs and alcohol, but my thinking had descended back into a state of dis-ease, this time focused on a person. It was particularly alarming. Before, I had been able to blame drugs and alcohol for my insanity. Now what?
YOUR CASE IS BEING CONSIDERED
I woke up one morning after about a year of this insanity. The sexual obsession was at its peak. As I went through my day, there was the front that I presented to the world and then there was the horrific 70 mm pornographic film that was taking place in my head. Walking down the street in San Francisco, I ran into an acquaintance of mine. We exchanged pleasantries and then he asked if I wanted to join him for an art opening at a gallery nearby. I thought, Yes. Art. Anything to get me out of my head.
“What’s the address?” I asked.
“69 Powell,” he replied.
Involuntarily, my fingers tightened and rolled themselves into fists. “Powell” was her last name.
I stared into his eyes, trying to see if he was messing with me. “Are you telling me that 69 Powell is the address of the art gallery?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said. “Meet me there if you like.” And he was off.
I stood there on the sidewalk looking at the sky and suddenly burst into laughter, which led into tears. This was not exactly the hand of God reaching out of the sky, but it might as well have been. I had been cut off from my heart for a very long time, so alone. Here, in my lowest moment, was my Higher Power speaking in the language we communicate in—the language of synchronicity. It went beyond words. I felt immediate knowing and relief. I was not alone. My case was being considered.
I wrote a final note to this woman, which shifted the energy and ended my involvement in whatever our relationship had become by this point. Time passed, and I slowly climbed out of the dark place where I had been. Obviously, there was work to do. I could not find peace within the confines of a relationship, nor could I find peace as a single person. I felt close to my Higher Power, a real presence, but what had been the purpose of that whole episode? What did I need to learn? What had I missed along the way?
It is a common story that people who put down one addiction tend to pick up another. Over the past 25 years, I have observed in myself and countless others that just underneath drug addiction and alcoholism, codependency lurks. Remember, codependency is a form of addiction with regard to the way we relate to others. It is hard to pin down because people who struggle with it exhibit many different behaviors. Relationship issues of every kind seem to crop up for codependents. This is part of the reason so many people end up relapsing after years of recovery. They experience the unique and unbearable pain of codependent behavior, which includes terrible obsession like I experienced. I referred to it earlier as “the disease of the lost self,” which makes a lot of sense in light of my story with it. I was fortunate to get out of that scrape with my recovery and sanity intact. It taught me that I had to address underlying relationship issues, which I had not addressed through my 12-Step work. I always felt that part of the reason I had to go through that relationship was to understand this important piece of the puzzle. For the time being, I didn’t have a solution, but I was keen on finding one.
Addiction is not about a particular substance. If you stay on the path of recovery, you will come to the point where you see your vulnerabilities, the places where life challenges you. People who struggle with addiction in one area often struggle with addictive behavior in other areas. These are the places where you can work to grow into the person you hope and dream to be. As people in recovery, our job is to look. At all costs, we must not look away. That is where the trouble starts and addiction gets a foothold once again. As life makes us aware of the places where we are out of balance, we will need to address them or pay dear prices for looking away. Unfortunately, I was about to find out that there was another area of my life I had been looking away from for a long, long time.
CHAPTER 11
HITTING BOTTOM IN RECOVERY
When I was 11, I went to the Bahamas with my mother and sisters. There was a casino downstairs and all I wanted to do was play the slot machines. It was a logical extension of my childhood addiction to pinball—bright flashing lights, music, and other loud, hypnotic noises—with the intrigue of winning money thrown into it. This really got my blood pumping, especially when three big red cherries showed up on the screen and quarters started falling out of the machine. I think I only won $10 that first time, but I might as well have won a million.
Later on, in my early 20s, I went to see the Grateful Dead in Las Vegas. What a combination of energies! All these drug-addled Deadheads in the madness of Sin City. I was already two years sober but very far from true recovery and dreadfully out of touch with myself. As I have previously mentioned, long after I had gotten sober and was on a path supported by the 12 Steps, I was still caught up in addictive thoughts and behaviors. I was setting the stage to bring a lot of pain into my life. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was about to get a real and true ass-whooping, and that weekend in Vegas I started down that path by winning $10,000 playing blackjack.
I floated through the casino like a god. Women loved me. Men loved me. I loved me. I treated Deadheads I didn’t even know to massages at the casino spa. I bought dinner for 30 people. Whenever I laid money down, I won. It was uncanny. The climax of the mayhem came when I decided to wager $2,400 on one single hand, which for me was an unconscionable sum of money. I won the hand, my heart pounding out of my chest, and somehow managed to stop and leave Vegas with 100 hundred-dollar bills.
Back home in San Francisco, my cousin Roger Low and I got together and I told him about my incredible gambling skills. He smiled strangely and plainly said, “This was the worst thing that could ever have happened to you. Congratulations.”
Roger had left Cornell engineering school after his first two semesters with a 0.0 GPA. Though he was a savant in many respects, attending college in a traditional setting was not to be Roger’s calling. Instead he announced that he would be leaving to pursue a career as a professional backgammon player in the casinos of the world. The family was freaked out about Roger’s decision but he had made up his mind.
Within a year or so, to everyone’s amazement, Roger ascended to the top of the international backgammon rankings. He was world-ranked somewhere in the top three for most of his career. However, what makes Roger completely unique in the world of professional gambling is the fact that he was able to quit when he wanted to. After making a lot of money playing backgammon, Roger was approached by a money manager who took him on as a protégé. He figured that with Roger’s understanding of mathematics, statistics, and probabilities, he would be a great asset. He was right!
Roger transitioned out of the world of casino gambling to another form of gambling with higher stakes and better odds. He applied himself to learn the business of trading options and had an outstanding run up until October 1987, when calamity fell. One Friday morning Roger woke up with about $4 million in the bank. About a week later, when he lay down to “rest,” he was $8 million in the hole. He had personally lost $12 million in a single week.
That was what gamblers might refer to as a “bad beat,” a really tough loss that makes you want to throw up. A loss like that has post-traumatic stress disorder associated with it and it requires recovery to heal from it. Not kidding! It is traumatic. Well, Roger would have a chance to heal in every way. Over the next 23 years he would build a boutique options trading firm called Parallax Fund that would way outperform all indices. He would also have a hand in changing the course of my life.
WELCOME BACK, MR. ROSEN
Throughout my 20s, I continued a love-hate relationship with gambling. I never really obsessed about it unless I found myself in a place where gambling was legal—usually somewhere in the strange and twisted state of Nevada. I went there two or three times a year either for a Dead show, a business conference, or to ski at Lake Tahoe. Once I started gambling, as happened with cocaine, I could never stop until I was either too exhausted to continue or had lost all my money and couldn’t get any more. It would end with me hitting my friends up for cash once I had exhausted all other possibilities.
And believe me, in the gambling world there are plenty of other possibilities. Once you run out of your own cash, you can hit up your ATM cards. Once you’ve maxed your daily limit on those, then it descends to credit cards. Here you can get into real trouble because when you use your credit card to get a cash advance in a casino, you pay large fees as well as finance charges. In addition, you often have to deal with a call to the credit-card company because despite the fact that you have only taken out $3,000 of your $10,000 credit line, your next request for a cash advance is declined. So you get on the phone with a representative from the bank that issued your Visa card and the conversation goes something like this:
“Yeah, hi. I tried to get a cash advance for three thousand dollars, and it was declined.”
“Yes, sir. Well, it shows here that you took a cash advance from the Golden Nugget Casino for three thousand already this evening. Our system automatically freezes your account until we can verify large transactions such as these.”
The whole conversation is embarrassing. You’re losing money in a casino and taking out credit to gamble. You are totally aware of what you’re doing (especially if you’re sober), but all you can think of is getting more money so you can play games that you are likely going to lose while in an environment filled with the worst energy of all time. Worst of all, the person to whom you are speaking on the phone is checking to see if you are who you say you are and bringing to your attention your total financial irresponsibility. Finally the credit-card company grants you the right to pull out more cash and you decide immediately to risk it in the very same manner that you have done for the whole night.
Once the opportunities for credit-card advances have been exhausted, you get to take it to a whole new level: you get to borrow money directly from the casino. The communication between a gambler and a casino executive is one of the most twisted forms of human interaction. You walk into an office, which every casino has. It is the nicest room in the casino. It has a lot of dark wood and nice carpeting. It is somehow quiet and removed from the melee that is taking place just outside its door. The casino executive is friendly, understanding, professional, businesslike, and intimidating, like a rich, estranged family member you have to go to for money in a pinch. Face-to-face with a casino executive, a gambler does everything he can to appear as if he is fine. Secretly, he is glad to have the casino executive as a kind of friend/therapist at this moment, someone he can confide in. “It’s been a hellish night so far,” he might say to the casino executive.
“Let me take a look at your betting average for the night,” says the executive. “You’ve been averaging bets of seventy-five dollars per hand. That is good! If you were averaging up more around a hundred dollars, we could comp you a better room and better food.” You somehow hear the words That is good. Someone has just complimented you, made you feel better. You think, He understands me. All this time I have been feeling desperate, alone, and terrible about myself, but sitting here in this office, I feel better. This guy deals with people like me all the time. This isn’t such bad behavior after all. Everyone’s doing it! I feel hopeful, lucky even. Okay, what next?
“You’ve lost about twenty-five hundred tonight.” That’s precise, by the way, unless you have gambled at a table without volunteering to give them your ID. Why would you volunteer to give them your ID? Well, because they ask for it in a suave way, promising comps and other perks. That’s the first hook they get into you. Meanwhile, in front of the casino executive, you think, Jesus, what an amazing system they have! They know exactly what I’ve lost, and furthermore, they know the average money I’m spending on each bet. That’s pretty fucking mind blowing!
These folks know exactly what happens underneath their roof. They are great at their job of getting money from you—whether you are an addict or just someone looking to piss away some money. Once you have borrowed all you can from a casino, your bank account is virtually empty. Actually, no funds have yet been removed from your bank account, but they will be. The casino will put it to you like this: “Mr. Rosen, you owe the casino five thousand dollars. How would like to pay that?”
If you don’t know to ask, you may not realize that you can have 30 days to pay this tab. Many people will therefore go to their banks, one of which is likely right there in Vegas, empty their accounts, and give the proceeds to the casino, satisfying their “marker” or debt. Others will take the 30-day option and then, once they return home, struggle mentally with the fact that they have lost all that money.
Right around 30 days later, when you have still not been able to bring yourself to give your money to the casino (if you still have it), the casino starts to generate and send reminder notices, which become increasingly harsh. You will end up having your credit ruined if you do not pay the casino back. Ironically, the casino does not want this option any more than you do, for if your credit is ruined, they will lose, at least temporarily, a good customer.
Finally, you pay the casino back. Then, at some point in the not-too-distant future, you return to the casino—a rejuvenated hero—to repeat the process. “Mr. Rosen, how great to have you back. Congratulations on being here again. Can we get you some free drinks? Food? We can’t yet comp you a room, but we’ll watch your average betting numbers over the next few hours, and why don’t you come visit us this afternoon to see what we can do for you? In the meantime, good luck and let us know if you need anything at all.”
