Whiz Kid

After Mt. Vernon, Madison was a revelation. Surrounded by three beautiful lakes, the campus was an oasis of cool, the nucleus of a progressive city also the state capital. The population could not have been more diverse. Music and the arts thrived. There were myriad places to go. Bars galore. The drinking age was 18.

Once again, you’d done little to prepare for the move and so had to settle on a dumpy apartment with designated roommates: a Polish factory worker’s son from Milwaukee, Arthur and an exchange student from Thailand, whose name you couldn’t spell even if you remembered it. Though you had nothing in common with either of them, they were both diligent students, reserved in temperament, hardworking to their core. You hardly saw them, wouldn’t know they existed if not for the occasional aroma of Thai cooking or Arthur’s booming laugh. Once in a while you shared a beer. But making friends with your roommates was not a priority. You were only interested in two things: writing and women. Drinking seemed a foregone conclusion.

You expanded your proverbial horizons, joining the two campus newspapers as well as helping to create one of your own, a music-focused magazine called the Mad City Music Mirror. You saw your name in print every week and often received letters about things you had written. An audience! Your career as a professional writer had officially begun. Reviewing albums and concerts and films. Someday you would be a journalist for Rolling Stone. It was the perfect job, allowing you to write perilous prose, drink with abandon, and meet scores of beautiful and scandalous women. Highlights from this period included reviewing two up and coming bands, The Replacements and Violent Femmes. If not for your glowing praise, who knows whether either group would have succeeded? Such was your hubris.

In reality, you mostly reviewed local talent, including a hair band called Whiz Kid. Whiz Kid played Lover Boy and Head East covers for drunken sorority girls and the men who loved them. For two bucks a head one got three sets of music. Like any novice, you rejoiced in ripping them a new one. You were not up on that stage but you had a typewriter, which was mightier than any guitar. You poked fun at their cheesy name, ridiculed the matching spandex outfits and blow-dried big hair. Employing every bit of your modest skills, laughing out loud as you wrote. When the story got published you put it with all the others, in a scrapbook showcasing your diabolical wit.

Needless to say, Whiz Kid did not share your sense of humor.

Soon after the article came out, you stumbled into the lead singer at a club. The man knew who you were and he was plenty upset. He asked why you had so cruelly laid into his band. Was being a dick part of your job description? Your inebriated reply: No disrespect, brother, but playing covers by Lover Boy is what sealed your fate.

The vocalist did not punch you. Instead he hit back with something you would never forget. The reason his band played shitty music, he said, was in order to get gigs, so he could make rent and support his wife and new baby. None of the bars in town hired original talent unless they had a following. Whiz kid was unknown. Therefore, he had to sing Working for the Weekend because that’s what 19-year-olds paid money to see.

You had no defense. Because you had no clue the very real life this man had been leading. Struck by his truth, you were ashamed. From that moment forward, you abandoned your desire to be a professional critic. Whiz Kid had been working for the weekend, literally every weekend, in order to survive. You had no right criticizing them for doing so. Your cruel review served no discernible purpose. Save for hurting a group of people.

In light of this revelation, you pivoted. Deciding to be a copywriter, a form you were already familiar with given it was your father’s vocation. You wouldn’t even have to change your major, communication arts. You studied radio, television and film, took an advanced course in screen writing as well as continued writing for all the newspapers. No one could call you lazy. At night, between hunting down women and getting your drink on, you also began writing the great American novel. As well as an award-winning copywriter, you were going to be the next Jay McInerney. You’d found your North Star: the hard drinking writer. You would romanticize and hold onto this identity for decades.

In addition to liquor, women were key to your newfound persona. Chasing them down became pastime. Disenchanted by uptight female students, you developed a fondness for blue-collar girls. The former required too much effort. You’d once dated a sorority girl and spent weeks of nights trying to get past first base with her, which never happened. Cocktail waitresses had no such inhibitions. They seemed to want what you wanted, a few rum and Cokes, MTV, and sex on the carpet. You could leave at 4AM, without drama. Maybe you’d see them again. If not, it didn’t matter. Here was a contract you could get behind.

Reverse Engineering Your Humanity

The girls.

Despite your many defects, or just the one, the girls still wanted you home. You had evidence to support this. They didn’t mind nor were embarrassed you were a recovering alcoholic. They might have even thought it was cool. The night you drove Callie and her friends to In & Out, blasting Guns and Roses. Your girls respected your commitment to AA, and presumably to them. They knew you once were the shit in advertising; it still had currency, as both a point of pride as well as providing the means to pay for their horses, vacations and private schools. 

That said, you doubt they’d accurately processed your misadventures. One day they might understand. For now they were not even going there. Denial, forgiveness or something else their true feelings about your transgressions would likely never be fully revealed, and certainly not to you. Bottom line, they still loved you. And you would always love them.

Bill W. conceded that becoming entirely ready to remove our shortcomings may take time yet we should never say to ourselves, ‘This I will never give up!’ He underscored the word never. As in never shutting the door on possibility. For the path to right living lay just on the other side. There was a crack. You’d seen the light and were moving towards it, slowly. When Sarah went out for the night or on longer trips, you stayed home reading a book or watching a movie. When Sarah was home you spent time with her, talking about her day and yours, instead of retreating to your office. You forced yourself out of isolation, joining your family, for dinner or just conversation. Did you deserve a medal? Of course not. But doing the right thing did not come naturally. You must learn normal behaviors until they turned routine, acting as if they were natural until they became so. You had to reverse-engineer your humanity.

In the throws of your addiction, you couldn’t imagine stopping drugs and alcohol even though you knew they were killing you. The same for any addict, beneath the craving was a matrix of false assumptions. The first being that life wouldn’t be fun without booze and that you wouldn’t be either. But being an addict was no fun at all. You had also believed you would not be as creative straight, that your Libertarian right brain would go fallow without an endless supply of intoxicants, the same myth that wrecked a million artists, authors and musicians. In fact, you had to completely rewrite your first novel because you’d written it inebriated, its paragraphs rambling on like a drunken floozy at the bar. Had Ernest Hemmingway, Dorothy Parker and Charles Bukowski required spirits to write? If they hadn’t died ignominiously they might well have answered yes. But they were addicts and addicts have always justified their addictions. They had been blessed with talent before pouring alcohol on top of it. Not the other way around. Regardless, you were not Ernest Hemingway and would never be. Drinking like him only insured you would die like him, if not sooner. Countless other false beliefs permeated the drinker. It was a social lubricant, it helped you with the ladies, it gave you courage, and so on. Maybe for some people some of the time but for the chronic user those beliefs usually just lead to an ass kicking in the alley or whiskey dick in a motel room.

This I cannot give up…

If we place instincts first…we will be pulled backward into disillusionment.

The line is from the Twelve & Twelve – a book Bill Wilson authored some twenty years after writing the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Cliff notes for the 12 Steps. He suggested recovering alcoholics begin removing their character defects lest they fall back into drinking. In keeping with the program’s Christian pedigree, defects were defined as the Seven Deadly Sins: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy and Pride.

Lust wasn’t first on the list for nothing. Bill Wilson wrestled with his sexual appetites before and after getting sober and writing his manifesto. He adored his wife, revered her. But history suggests he liked the ladies, too. In the Big Book substantial text was devoted to prurient urges run amok. “Now about sex,” he wrote, “Many of us need an overhauling there.” You love AA was written by a man whose flaws did not go away after putting down the bottle.

Perhaps we shall be obliged in some cases still to say, “This I cannot give up yet…”

You’re not so depraved as to think this a loophole for misadventures. But you’re not willing to stop all of them either. You hadn’t been pulled backward into disillusionment. You were not bewildered by your actions. Yet. You were not dying inside. Yet. Nor were you drinking and using.

Yet.

The word clung. You didn’t need a sponsor to tell you how thin the ice was getting. You knew that you were playing a dangerous game, not only with your sobriety but with your family as well. In fact, you talked about it with your sponsor. Told him everything. He knew the primary reason you hadn’t stopped. You liked it too much.

Epilogue: Recovering what you have lost.

Continued from previous post…

So, has your definition for winning and losing changed? Maybe. Money and position don’t beguile you as much. Fortunate, given you have less of both. Yet, you still crave that feeling you got overhearing those students. The yearning never disappears completely. The ego cannot be evicted. From the program: If you want self-esteem do estimable things. Helping others. Or in your case simply not hurting anyone. Taking things in stride.

Serenity will always be ephemeral but it’s not a pipe dream. It can be achieved. You once joked that serenity was a pole dancer in Sacramento. Now that you’ve acquired some would you mortgage it for a shiny new job? Sadly. Probably. But at least you would know better. And that’s a start.

Life needn’t be something you master or endure. Mastery was an illusion. Enduring is a consequence. Letting go is what brings you true contentment. Winning and losing, fine for business and the ballpark, are the wrong terms for right living. Beyond shaking addiction, the word recovery means finding what you had lost.

Wheels Off. Tire Fire. Burning Bridges. All The Cliches…

Continued from previous post…

You began acting callously and with impunity. Courting the trade press, you would say whatever came first, seeking credit and taking it. You then collected these stories in a shoebox, like scalps. The more awards you won the more you took winning for granted. You expected victory. When you got a substantial raise you asked for stock in the agency. You demanded monster bonuses. And got them. No title was big enough. Executive Chairman? You weren’t even sure what that meant. Put it on the fucking business card.

Sure, you created bridges but you began burning them as well. Whoever could help you was a loyalist. Everyone else was simply in the way. Always a competitive field now became ruthless. You made enemies, inside and outside your company. They were just jealous, you thought. And did it matter? Tables turned they would treat you the same as an opponent. Or so you believed.

In the eye of this storm a moral compass was useless. Drugs and alcohol became your closet allies. Feeding your ego. Telling you full speed ahead. Cunning, baffling and powerful! They would deliver you to the Promised Land. Back to that feeling you once experienced by the elevators. But of course it was all an illusion, their siren song leading you out to sea alone in a tempest. You would not be the first captain to have crashed upon the rocks.

Your hands trembled in a meeting. So you folded them under the table, hoping no one would notice. You perspired so you brought an extra shirt to the office. You ran for miles along Lake Michigan. At the gym, you tried to work out what was wrong. In the steam room you couldn’t see what was happening. Fear crept in where confidence once reigned. You took Valium and Xanax, along with the drinking.

The wheels were coming off.

For all your hubris it was this obsession with work that would save your life. When you realized your job was at stake, then and only then, you decided to quit. Not for your marriage or your family or even your health. Those lines you’d crossed a long time ago. You’d mortgaged most of your relationships. Your wife was in denial. Your father had written one of his letters. None of that mattered. The great copywriter and rainmaker you were not willing to lose.

In rehab, the group leader, himself a former addict, told you that maybe an advertising career wasn’t in your best interest. That it threatened your sobriety. He warned its venal culture would only suck you back in. You spitefully replied that you made more money in one week than he did all year. Quit your job? Unthinkable. Keeping it was why you’d stopped drinking in the first place! Sick as you were, this had been the most lucrative time of your life. You’d made over a million dollars. Losing all that for something as ephemeral as serenity? Please. What you did not tell the social worker was that you feared he was right.