[originally published 09/23/2012]
On Thursday, August 2, 2012, I composed the following author's note, to be placed as an afterword for the novel, Pitch:
Emporia [Kansas] was magical in the 80s. I arrived as a young college student, my fi rst time living away from home, to a strange new world. My Lit class had a high-brow reading list full of titles I’d never heard of. My art professor screened a print of a Fellini film so unsettling that I walked out at the reel change. And just down the street from campus sat the Full Moon Café, where aspiring beatniks shared frank poetry every Wednesday for open mic night. I thought I had died and gone to Paris.
But I wasn’t in Paris, and by the time that realization hit me, I had learned to drink like Hemingway. The drinking went on for a long time, growing like the slow burn, devolving the drinker from the lower stages of mere irresponsibility to the upper echelons of violence and destruction. As far as drinking buddies went, I was not that safe bet with whom you could “just grab a coupl’a beers.”
After a few years of good, honest practice at alcoholism, the 90s came and the magic was gone. I hit that ubiquitous bottom, also in Emporia, and crawled into a Program of Recovery. I can’t remember if it was good at the beginning, but something in the back of my memory indicates that it was not. I expected grand miracles and a road to Damascus type of conversion, but instead I got a game of inches, the meandering crawl of day-to-day living without the drink. A friend of mine in the Program, who for obvious reasons will remain anonymous, used to remind me that I was “slooooooowly getting better.” I didn’t like the slooooooowly part, but there it was.
A mere two months sober, I discovered that the biggest casualty to this new way of life was my creativity. Prior to getting into the Program, I wrote at my tinny electric typewriter with an almost manic abandon, churning out page after page of mindless, str¬eam-of-consciousness drivel until all hours of the night. But once sober, I started to learn how to shut off my mind, or at least slow it down. Suddenly, that ramble-factory that I mistook for writing had been hit with tough economic times and closed its gates. I spent hours staring at the blank page, thinking about drinking, and then calling someone in the Program (usually my “slooooooowly getting better” friend) to talk me down. For the first time in my life, I had come face to face with your everyday writer’s block. And yet, I had to write, felt the proverbial fire in my gut that so many writers talk about, and it soon became apparent that I would have to learn a new way to do it.
One fine afternoon in 1994, I was driving up the Kansas Turnpike from El Dorado to Emporia. I believe I was four months sober, but it might have been less. As I glided along in my rust-colored Chevy Cavalier, listening to a cassette mix tape of angry speed metal, I began to wonder what the future held for me. What would I be like in ten years, provided I stayed sober? Would I even make it to ten years? What steps must I take to stay sober from this time to that?
And then it dawned on me. What if I could step through time and see that sober version of myself ten years down the line? Maybe it would give me some perspective, maybe give me something to shoot for. Better yet, what if my former self, that violent, still-practicing alcoholic who used to leave a Matt-sized hole in everything he touched, could make the same journey?
What if the sober me from the future could meet the un-sober me from the past? What would they talk about? What would they say?
That evening, I set out to write Pitch, the story of this meeting, and I got nowhere with it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it would be impossible for me to manifest this story with a mere four months sobriety. The story I wanted to tell required an insight and understanding that I lacked at the time. For you see, to write about a man with at least ten years sobriety, I needed to be at least ten years sober myself, and in order to do that, well … I had to stay sober for ten more years.
I set the story aside, poking at it from time to time only to remind myself that it was still there, and instead threw myself into sobriety. It didn’t go the way I had planned at first, and the slooooooowly part became tiresome after awhile, but I did it one day at a time, and I tried not to look back. In the meantime, I told a few other stories, and I worked at putting them on paper, and in the process I strung together enough days clean to make this story happen.
In a way, you might say Pitch was my salvation, or at least part of it. It’s not the only reason I stayed sober, but it provided enough incentive to make me fight for my sobriety in the early going. And although it isn’t my only story, it was the one story I wanted—needed—to tell, and the only way it was going to happen was if I stayed in the fight for the long haul.
That’s the miracle of sobriety and the miracle of storytelling.
Saturday, September 22, 2012, I add the following epilogue to this afterword:
Someone once told me that the word SOBER was an acronym for Son Of a Bitch! Everything's Real!" In the last few weeks, those words have been driven home over and over. It started perhaps on July 19, when I was laid off from my job--son of a bitch, everything's real. Then my father's surgery went south and he fell into critical condition--son of a bitch, evertyhing's real. And then these last few weeks, as his condition has hovered somewhere in the middle, giving me and my family little to cling to or prepare for ... one day, Dad is good, the next not so good. He neither has shown steady improvement, nor has he shown steady decline. We dare not be hopeful, nor do we dare prepare for the worst because we just don't know.
Son of a bitch, everything's real.
I have been in Kansas almost a month. I desperately miss my wife, miss my cats. I miss working, miss having a job, miss being around a place where I call home so I can jump into the job-hunting scene. Meanwhile, it feels like the earth is slowly contracting, like the shifting walls at the end of Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," pushing me ever closer to the cavernous drop.
This last week I hit the outlying boundaries of my sanity, and the only place I had left to go was the drink. I lay awake at night thinking about drinking. I got up in the night and walked the streets of the town where I grew up, wondering where the open taverns were now located. At times, my mind would wander to the bottle of Chivas Regal in the cupboard above my parents' refrigerator. My father has been only social drinker for the last 50 years or so, and even then not very dramatic in consumption. This bottle of Chivas is evidence of that. He bought it in the late 1960s for a dinner party (man, consider how it's aged!), and most of it is still there in the bottle, certainly enough for me to tie one on late at night after my mother goes to bed.
When a sober alcoholic contemplates a relapse, it's hard to explain it to normal people. Most "normies" try to reason away the imperious urge:
"Don't drink now, bro! You're on a roll!"
"Think of all the people who depend on you!"
"It would break your mother's heart!"
"Your wife would leave you!"
And then the more condescending ones:
"You need to get right with God!"
"Not reading your Bible enough, I see."
"When was the last time you went to an AA meeting?"
All are well-meaning, I realize, but none of them get it. They don't have this disease. They think that the craving for alcohol should be easily controlled with self-will--therefore, the acloholic is weak--or they make broad assumptions the other way, like all the alcoholic has to do is see a photograph of a beer and he'd kill his mother to get to it. Alcohol for the alcoholic, is indeed a weakness. The Program itself admits it in the first of the Twelve Steps, where the acoholic is urged to admit his own powerlessness. But once one accepts that powerlessness and then turns his will over to the care of God as he understands Him, a great strength follows. It doesn't mean that the disease goes away, but the spiritual focus of the Program relieves the symptoms of craving and refocuses the alcoholic to a more productive path.
For the past few days, I have lost my spirit. So intense was the will to drink that it became physically painful. I did not care who it hurt. I did not care who I lost. I did not care what I lost. I cared only for the drink.
So what saved me? What kept me from giving in to the craving?
The book Pitch, of course. Pitch, as you now know, is about the very things I've been talking about. The story tumbled from the ether when I first got sober, and it gave me a sense of groundedness in the early going because it was writing, my one great passion, the very thing that God has inscribed on my heart in the largest and most colorful font. The writing process engaged in the creation of Pitch mirrored the recovery process of sobriety, and as I said in my afterword, in a way this story helped me find redemption.
Once again, God has sent the book to save me. For you see, this novel is the culmination of a lot of dreams. To get one of my novels published has been something I have worked for, for many years. Were I a goofy kid in my 20s, I might be inclined to sabotage this goal, but these days not so much.
But here is what is essential. The marketing of this book--what I think of as the book's greatest appeal--is that its narrative of redemption reflects my own. No, I was never as evil as the violent Pooch Shepherd, nor have I ever been as saintly as his sober counterpart Nick Shepherd, but there are still aspects of the character in me. One of the readers who helped Pitch reach publication said that I had a personal story to tell, a story of how even in the worst of it hope never dies.
But who would accept that story if I drank again? Everything that I believe makes the book special would then be dismissed as a lie. I would be labeled a hypocrite, and no one would want to hear the tale I had to tell because they would not trust the teller.
So over the last week, I have stayed sober for Pitch. Once again, the miracle of storytelling and the miracle of sobriety walk hand-in-hand. Desire'e once sang that "time is too lonely, to lonely without words." In my case, time without words is worse than lonely--it's death. The words have come to the rescue, and thanks to God, they have enabled me to tell you this story, a story of deliverance rather than one of decline.
You don't choose the book; the book chooses you ... even if you're the one who wrote it.
No comments:
Post a Comment