Recovery 2 0, p.7
RECOVERY 2.0, page 7
An hour or so later the show ended. I remember being with Andrew and a whole bunch of new friends, some of whom are dear friends to this day. We smoked pot and cigarettes, drank beer, and just hung out. It was the coolest feeling. There was no immediate responsibility. We were hanging simply to hang with each other. It was a state of just being and enjoying life. I had never done that before. There seemed always to be such pressure on me. Somehow the combination of elements that evening made it possible to slow down enough to enjoy a moment. I can’t express to you how important it was for me to experience that.
I returned with a friend to Taft the next day. I had gone to a concert, taken acid there, and had a great time. Now I was back at boarding school, and I could continue on with life as it had been. Wrong! Nothing would ever be the same for me. There had been a permanent shift overnight. I … was … a … Deadhead! All I wanted to do was devour everything that had to do with the band. I wanted to hear more music, pore over the lyrics, look at the books, and learn the history of this phenomenon. I had been longing for something different, and boy, had I found it.
I would find other Deadheads at Taft, so I knew that even when things got difficult, there was relief to be had. There was now a place I could go to be with my chosen kin. Who knew when or where it would happen? But it would happen. I’d be with the Dead sometime soon again. My spirit came alive with the thought of it.
I spent as much time as I possibly could in the Grateful Dead scene from that point forward. On a regular basis I had about as much fun as one could have. I had lots of friends with whom I was on an adventure, traveling across huge swaths of the United States. I started to connect with some really amazing girls. While I was following the Dead on tour, there was relative simplicity to it all. We traveled to the next show. We took drugs and we danced hard. We ate whenever we wanted to. We hung out. We crashed in some hotel room or at a local college or at someone’s parents’ home. I started to feel a sense of genuine love for myself. Wow, I fit in somewhere! And the people I was with on Dead tour were funny, educated, brilliant, driven, but all in this off-the-wall, zany kind of way. Many of these friends attended Ivy League schools, for example, and like me, they couldn’t get enough of the Grateful Dead. We’d see these maniacs at Dead shows at set-break huddling together in some seating section of an arena, lit up on LSD and writing their English midterm papers. We had amazing discussions and deep connections and a ton of raucous laughter. We knew we were living outside the norm of society and we took pride in that. I was discovering the beauty within and around me. I was also escaping the suffocation of my immediate family’s anxiety and fears.
CHASING THE HIGH AND LOSING BEGINNER’S MIND
There were many exceptional Dead shows, but there were three shows in particular that impacted me on a level profound enough that the addict part of me could not leave it at that. These nights were so monumental that I would end up chasing after them at future concerts (and in other venues) for years to come. It was complete joy, like when I found marijuana for the first time. I wanted to experience this feeling over and over. Most of the Deadheads around me were in the same boat, so we egged each other on. On the one hand, we had love and understanding; on the other hand, we had addiction and understanding.
There were times when the Dead would come out and have a shitty night. I would get frustrated—really frustrated—with their song selection or the way they decided to arrange their tunes. The fact was, I was coming there for a profound spiritual experience, and if they didn’t deliver, I’d get really pissed off. Every now and then I’d catch myself and realize how out of the present moment I was. I was not trying to have an experience; I was trying to recreate an experience. That is exactly what an addict seeks to do. Having felt profound pleasure, I sought to replicate it again and again. Some nights I was more in the moment than others, but I was aware even then that something had changed. My first experiences with the Dead were fresh and new. I had no idea what to expect, no idea what was coming. I had then what Zen Buddhists would call “beginner’s mind.” Later, I lost that altogether and became attached to a memory in the past.
The present moment is elusive for most addicts—not that we are trying to find it. We’d be happy being anywhere at all as long as we can avoid facing “the now.” Our addiction begins the second we start looking away and our Addiction Story is built through the continuation of that habit. We look away because we imagine, correctly or incorrectly, that it will hurt to look. We imagine that the most horrible things will happen if we dig into the original hurts, but ironically, it is only by looking directly at the pain that we can begin to understand it, process it, and heal it. Interestingly, the Grateful Dead were singing songs about the human condition, weakness, addiction, strength, love, and pain. There is so much love and pain in that music. Maybe that is what drew us all there in the first place—there was this mass therapy thing going on. They sang to us about us in the strangest, most hauntingly beautiful melodies. During the best moments, there was literally nowhere else on the planet we would have chosen to be. During the worst moments, I was just stuck inside my own mind with the “-ism” messing with me as usual.
BREAKING MY HEART AND BURYING MY SHADOW
After my childhood on the Upper East Side and my attendance at private schools, the world of the Grateful Dead offered something entirely different. It was as if the Grateful Dead world had been constructed for me and others like me, people who craved a kind of freedom that was not available in the world we had grown up in. I have known and heard about many people who are similar to me but who never find their own version of the Grateful Dead. These people often try to kill themselves because they are not graced with a vision beyond their confinement. My parents felt that the Grateful Dead universe was somehow responsible for my addiction. Actually, I think the Grateful Dead saved my life.
However, where there is light, there is also shadow, and I learned a lot about addiction from the Grateful Dead scene. I came to know the difference between kids who were experiencing freedom and relief and kids who were existing so as not to feel much of anything or to avoid something dreadful. Like me, so many had lost or had never found a sense of identity. The drugs and the determination to keep things going as they were, the attachment to having things be a particular way, the need for the show to go on and to remain at a distance from the things that were plaguing us—all these things became a part of our agenda. This was the shadow side of it.
In the summer of 1985, I went out on tour with the Grateful Dead to a run of shows. This particular run was the high point of my time with them. I experienced what I would call perfect moments when everything seemed to click. I was in the zone the whole time. I had been gone for about ten days when I made the mistake of calling my mom to check in. She was beyond livid. I had not thought to call before then. Frankly, it hadn’t even occurred to me to do so. I had just graduated from high school and would be attending the University of Colorado after the summer. I was 18 and free, or so I imagined. At the moment I called we were about to head into a show at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland. My mother demanded that I come home immediately. That was a moment of truth. Somehow, my mom still held sway over me—I could not blow her off altogether. As my friends headed into the concert, I boarded an Amtrak train for New York City.
My mother met me at the door when I got home. I was dressed in full hippie regalia, patchouli and all. She announced that she was heading out with some friends for the evening and left. The next thing I knew, I was sitting alone in the apartment in New York City where I had grown up. I shook my head in utter disbelief, went into my bathroom, and stared at myself in the mirror, saying, “This will never happen again! This will never, ever happen again.” Anger consumed me.
It’s a very difficult thing to go so quickly from love to hate. In that moment I hated my mother. I hated myself as well for not having had the “strength” to stay out on the road. It was all so confusing. I had experienced no anger for the previous two weeks and in no time at all I was consumed by it. Who wants to be told what to do? No one. Who wants to feel controlled? No one. My issues with my mother were more complex than that. I knew she had had a rough time in her life and I felt bad about it. When she was struggling I really wanted to help. I never wanted to hurt or make things worse. Part of the pain was to realize that there was nothing I could do about her suffering. She was so miserable sometimes that I did not want to be around it. When she tried to control me, my gut reaction was to get away or lash out directly at her. So it was that on many occasions when I could not stand it any longer, I would look directly at her and say, “Fuck you. Fuck off. Get the fuck out of my life. I cannot stand you and there is nothing you can fucking do to control me. You’re miserable. I’m not. So fuck off.”
The hangover from these bouts of anger was immense—remorse, guilt, sadness. I was acutely aware that men had mistreated Mom for most of her life. My intention had been to fix it all but I was making it worse. It broke my heart to realize this. My next move was to simply get far away. If I felt trapped in her pain, the frustration grew until I lost my temper. One day I’d be on Dead tour in a world of possibility, space, love, and acceptance. The next day I’d be screaming violently into my mother’s face. I am not a violent person but these moments were exactly that. I recognized even then that this behavior was unacceptable to me. I couldn’t get my mind around the two extremes. If most of my friends in the Dead scene had witnessed me yelling at my mother, they would have been shocked, too. I was so angry and didn’t know where to turn. I would head to more Dead shows, try to hang around positive people, and come to some manner of acceptance that there was a part of me that I was not proud of and for which there was no solution. I’d bury it alive.
CROSSING THE LINE FROM LOVE TO ADDICTION
Behaviors become addictions when they are used continuously to avoid something. I did not want to look at the problem—actually, I could not imagine how to begin to look at the problem. Though I recognized that something was wrong with me, my main thought was “go with what seems to be working.” That meant to distance myself from home as much as possible.
The more drugs I took, the more my anger and other issues were pushed down inside me. The drugs acted as a suppressant, which would take care of the symptoms but never touch the core dis-ease. I was still reaching some ecstatic places through drugs and dancing, but it cost me. The original hurts never got dealt with, so all subsequent hurts got piled on top. It gets to the point where you are feeling emotions that no longer correspond to what is actually happening in the present moment. This is deep-seated resentment, and it is a killer. Without being able to work it out, the pressure of the need to feel better from it will overwhelm you and cause you to go deeper into darkness than you may have thought was possible. Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter wrote, “Day to day, just letting it ride. You get so far away from how it feels inside. You can’t let go ’cause you’re afraid to fall, but the day may come when you can’t feel at all.”1 That lyric always cut right to the heart of the matter for me.
CHAPTER 5
THE PROGRESSION
My beliefs about drugs developed quickly and I separated them into two categories: good and bad. Good drugs were “natural” and came from the earth: marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms, for example. LSD, other psychedelic drugs, and Ecstasy counted as well because they provided powerful, mystical, and mostly positive experiences. Bad drugs were all powders, such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin, and all prescription medications, such as Valium. Through seven years of drug use, I stuck to the good drugs and preached against all the others. I built a whole world around marijuana; I bought it, sold it, grew it, smoked it, and ate it. As you know, it was a big part of my identity. And that was perhaps the thing I missed most—an identity. Who was I? What was I here to do? Marijuana became more than just a medicine. For a while it was my vocation, my avocation, my course of study, my friend. It was a reason to be.
The bad drugs did not fit anywhere in my Addiction Story at the time. It was unthinkable to me to ever do cocaine. I used to watch people do it in my first year in college. They were usually behind a closed door at some party. There was this air of secrecy about it. At first I thought that it was because it was such an expensive drug that people who had it didn’t want to share it with the whole party. There was some truth to that. Later on, I would come to understand that there was also a certain amount of control, weirdness, and shame that went along with using it. Cocaine was at the next level. It was a harder, more serious drug. It was highly physically addictive and tended to make people want more of it whether they were full-blown addicts or not.
I always preached against the use of this drug. I was the kid who everyone knew would never do cocaine. One night in my sophomore year of college, a friend of mine approached and said, “Tommy, I’m going to hang out with these two girls, and we have a bunch of cocaine. Want to come along?” Before I could think, the word yes came out of my mouth. We snorted lines and drank some beers and flirted together till midnight, when we ran out of cocaine. I knew where my friend had gotten it. Without telling anyone, I went into the other room to make a phone call to get more. It was so natural to me. “Oh, we’ve run out of cocaine. It’s midnight. We’ll get some more of it and continue this romp.”
My friend came in and said, “Dude, what are you doing?”
I said, “I’m getting more coke.”
He said, “Dude, you’re jonesing.” I had never heard that word before. Jonesing? Yes, the feeling of wanting more. I was jonesing.
That night was the first night I ever partied with cocaine. It grabbed me by the balls immediately. The feeling it produced was quick and strong. It lifted me up, made me feel good. There was a psychosexual element to it. It was sexy. The girls felt sexy. I felt sexy. I was turned on by the whole experience. For the rest of the night we snorted cocaine until there was no more cocaine to be had. At the end of the night, we went our separate ways. I was hopped up out of my skull and couldn’t sleep for many hours. The thoughts I experienced during that time were predominantly negative and hard to take.
What made it all right for me to say yes to cocaine that night versus any other? I had been around it for years and turned it down. Suddenly, I was all over it. I wasn’t in a depression—I felt fine, actually. For some reason, the ethics I had, which included not doing cocaine, were thrown out the window.
This speaks to the progressive nature of the dis-ease of addiction. Remember that my core issues were still alive and festering within me. I had not yet begun to face the original traumas of my life. On the one hand, I was carrying a lot of anger toward my parents, while on the other hand, I was living as this peace-loving Deadhead. The Frequency of Addiction was alive and well within me. The -ism was getting more intense. I needed stronger methods of looking away from the present moment and my life in general. I’d been looking away from things for a long time by then, and somehow I needed more of something. The addition of potential sex to the whole situation was compelling because sex was another behavior I sought as much as possible.
The greatest testimony I can make to the progressive nature of the dis-ease of addiction is that I tried cocaine and then later started to smoke it. Once you start smoking cocaine you have exited the realm of experimentation. You are truly no longer involved in recreational drug use, and you actually are aware of this. Your addiction really gets to flex its muscle in this venue. This is the “big leagues.” You have arrived on the psychotic shores of that rarified thing known as drug-induced insanity.
By late 1988 my addiction had entered a new category marked by the addition of crack cocaine to the roster of activities I was involved in. I had been doing a lot of coke for the past year or two, and somewhere in there, it was suggested to me that I take a hit of freebase cocaine (crack).
People who smoke crack together are stoic and precise in their communication. At first, as the initial preparation of coke is being cooked, the participants—never more than three or four—may exchange mischievous smiles or amazingly cynical jokes, but inevitably the verbal communication trails off until finally the only things uttered are those things that have to be uttered to allow the “partying” to continue. There really are no pleasantries because nothing about the whole experience is too pleasant. There is, of course, the walloping initial high produced by taking a big hit, and everyone looks on as if they’re watching you have an orgasm, because in some sick, shadowy way you are. Then everyone else wants to have the same experience over and over again, even though it lasts a short amount of time, is horribly vacuous, and, in the end, leaves you devoid of life force, crying like a man who realizes he has lost everything, because for that night, at least, you have. And eventually you will lose everything for good.
