DRAGONS SO HUGE

My friend Bobby Biedrzycki and I wrote this piece together about an experience we shared.

BOBBY: First off, I think it’s important for you to know that this is not a story about endings, although there will be talk of endings. And that this is not a story about addiction, although there will be lots of talk of addiction. And this is definitely not a story about suicide, although there will be talk of suicide. Because most importantly, beyond all the things I just mentioned and beyond just about everything else, this is a story about miracles.

Megan: October 2009, the last night of 2nd Story’s very first West Coast tour. I was sitting alone on the back patio at the Bookwalter Vineyard in Washington State, drinking a hot-off-the-presses Pinot Noir out of a very fancy glass, which for some magical reason always makes it taste better. Behind me, inside Bookwalter’s jam-packed wine bar, I heard Seeking Wonderland, 2nd Story’s house band, and the happy, tipsy chatter of our post-show audience. We kicked ass that night. We kicked ass all three nights; opening the Wordstock Lit Festival in Portland and two sold-out shows in the vineyard, surrounded on all sides by miles of grapes and above us—stars. I remember watching them like a movie. In the city, you can never see them, but out there, it was one of those moments where you understand how enormous the world really is.

That’s when Bobby sat next to me. He’s a storyteller. He’s also my friend. He’s also, I had recently learned—learned, in fact, one week earlier, the day before we flew to Portland—an alcoholic. Friends of ours reading this will wonder how I didn’t know, how I didn’t see. I’ve asked myself that same question, and every answer sucks: I didn’t want to see. I was busy, we weren’t that close, we never hung out at night, he didn’t care what I thought, and he damn sure didn’t want to change—at least not until that last night of our tour, when he sat next to me under the stars.

He was holding a drink.

After the week we’d just had, he had the nerve to sit down next to me with a glass of fucking wine. I looked at it—not at him, just the glass—and you know what he said? He said:

Bobby: “I’m done.”

Megan: He held it up, studying the contents like a map.

Bobby: “I’m not gonna drink anymore.”

Megan: Maybe some of you have heard those words before. Hell, maybe you’ve said them. Last drink ever? Riiiight. That’d be a fucking miracle.

Bobby: So where do you begin a story about miracles? Well, this one starts at the bottom. In October 2009, I was suicidal. That Tuesday morning before we left for Portland, I found myself standing on a train platform in Edgewater, ready to die. This did not happen overnight. I had been struggling for years with depression, anxiety, and a long time addiction to drugs and alcohol. A close friend had died the year before; I had found him in the apartment we shared, and the image of his dead body was burned into my mind. Life had been getting progressively hazy, but right then, standing on that train platform, life was beyond hazy; life was pitch black.

Megan: That same morning, I woke up to voicemails: Bobby didn’t show up for rehearsal, didn’t show up to our meeting, didn’t show up to teach his morning class. No one knew where he was, and in 24 horribly short hours, I was supposed to get on a plane with Bobby, three other storytellers, and a nine-piece band. Our artistic director, Amanda, had gone to Portland ahead to rent cars, and before she’d left, she’d said, “Just promise you’ll get them on the plane; in their seats, belts fastened.”

If I could find Bobby, I’d have belted him to the fucking wings.

Bobby: I’d been on a three-day drug and alcohol bender brought on by increasing anxiety attacks, or had I been coming off a three-day anxiety attack brought on by drugs and alcohol? When dealing with these two afflictions it’s often hard to tell which is which.

Those of you out there that have battled any or all of these issues would probably agree that suicide is always an option. For me though, it was usually a ways down the line though. If this, this, this, or this doesn’t work out, then I can always just kill myself. I know it sounds grim, but when you live with it for long enough it becomes your reality. But on that day before we left for Portland, suicide was no longer E, F, or G; suicide was plan A-ish. I’d been staying with Amanda and her boyfriend, Nic, and that morning, when I left their condo, I was pretty sure I was going to kill myself.

Megan: By the time our friend Julia called, I was wrecked.

“Did Bobby call?”—we said at the same time.

“No.”—we said at the same time.

And then, cautiously, she asked if I had keys to Amanda’s. At the time, I ran workshops for 2nd Story out of her and Nic’s living room. “Sure,” I told Julia, “I have keys,” and then she said it: “You know what this weekend is, right?” Suddenly, none of it mattered. Who cared if we got on the plane. Who cared about our stupid tour, our stupid stories. The year before—almost to the date—Bobby had walked into his friend’s bedroom and found him dead.

Now, Bobby was missing. And the only one with house keys was me.

[pause]

Bobby: Standing on that train platform—

Megan: Standing in front of Bobby’s bedroom door—

Bobby: I wasn’t…scared—

Megan: I was so scared—

Bobby: I actually felt kind of calm.

Megan: I’d already looked everywhere else: the living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, two offices, five closets, walk-in pantry, behind two shower curtains, sunroom, back porch, garage; each step an attempt to avoid his bedroom, because honestly—

Bobby: I still hadn’t decided if I was going to do it.

Megan: If he was going to do it, that’d be the place.

Bobby: I mean, you don’t decide until you decide, right?

[pause]

Megan: I reached for the doorknob—

Bobby: The tracks began to rumble—

Megan: It was like watching a movie—

Bobby: Getting louder—

Megan: When you already know what’s going to happen—

Bobby: Getting closer—

Megan: And you yell No, don’t do it! at the characters like they can hear you—

Bobby: And as it pulled into the station, I had this thought: Nic and Amanda just purchased the condo I was living in. If I killed myself right here on these L tracks, a block away, they would never escape it. It would ruin their home, their neighborhood, even their lives. Now there are probably a million ways to psychoanalyze this thinking process, but in the moment it was just a fact: I can’t kill myself here, Nic and Amanda live here.

[pause]

I have to do it somewhere else.

[pause]

Megan: I opened the door—

Bobby: I boarded the train—

Megan: And saw an empty room. I thought I would feel relieved, but the thing about suicide is that once you’ve decided, you’ve decided.

There are a thousand bedrooms in this city.

A hundred L stops.

[pause]

I sat on Bobby’s bed for a long time, then I left him a voicemail: “Please, just call me… love you.”

Bobby: When I arrived at 95th street, as far south as the Red Line went, I checked my phone. I’d had it on silent, and when I looked it was full of messages and texts. I picked it up and heard a voicemail from Megan.

Megan: “Please, just call me… love you.”

Bobby: If there’s a moment I decided I wasn’t going to kill myself, at least not right then, and at least not on that train, this was the moment.

Megan: You never realize the power of your own words: “Please, just call me … I love you.”

Bobby: And within seconds of making that decision I went directly to a bar and got blackout drunk.

Megan: The next morning, face-to-face at the airport, my words were… not so nice. I yelled a lot—about the money our organization had sunk into this trip; the students he’d left waiting in the hallway; about standing in front of his bedroom door, and how I’d never get those minutes of my life back.

Any of you ever talk shop with an alcoholic?

He didn’t hear a word I said.

Bobby: The word alcoholic came at me from everywhere. Within an hour of landing in Portland, I got a call from the college where I teach, telling me I was suspended; my friends weighed in on my voicemail and to my face; and finally, my longtime therapist, Bea—a woman I trusted more than anyone on the planet—called long distance to say she’d seen enough.

“You’re an alcoholic and a drug addict. This is my diagnosis.”

I sat on a park bench outside our hotel, listening to her lay it out: she would no longer treat me for depression and anxiety, no more medications would be prescribed, and no more letters written to employers my behalf. She would not be my doctor if I did not go to rehab.

I couldn’t believe it. Through tears and screams I told her she was breaking our trust, that I was not going to rehab, and that she was going to keep treating me, or I’d sue her for malpractice. When she held strong, I told her to stay out of my life forever, then I hung up and sat on that bench, crying—right up until our tour manager called, telling me it was time to head to the theater. My heart nearly stopped. I had not thought about performing in days. I knew the piece, but I wasn’t sure I could actually get up on stage and do it.

Megan: He got up on stage and fucking brought the house down. The show was at The Bagdad, this old, beautiful theatre with a huge balcony—seats around 500, I’d guess? That night, it was packed for the opening night of Wordstock, and when Bobby performed, the crowd went crazy.

Bobby: Honestly? I don’t remember any of that.

Megan: His story was about sitting in a strip club and seeing—on the pole, dancing—the first girl he ever slept with. Right? He was fifteen years old, sooo in love with her, and—get this—she asks him to get her pregnant so she could trap her boyfriend. And Bobby did it! He slept with her!

Bobby: She was so beautiful. And I was Catholic! The only way you get to have sex when you’re Catholic is for procreation!

Megan: Anyhow—it was this crazy, awkward, improbable situation, but right at the end of the story, Bobby asks the audience—he asks us—to consider: “How a simple blip in the matrix—”

Bobby: My sperm not connecting with her egg—

Megan: “Allowed our lives to instead diverge.”

I’d heard Bobby tell that story a thousand times, and every time that line takes me right out of the strip club and into my own life: how a simple blip in the matrix allowed me to diverge. A blip, and I moved to Chicago; a blip, and I met my husband; a blip, and I’m talking to you. But back then, sitting in the balcony at The Bagdad Theater watching 500 people hang on Bobby’s every word, I wondered if this could, for him, be a moment where his life would diverge.

Bobby: The next morning we drove six hours to Bookwalter Vineyard in Washington State and did two more shows on consecutive nights. Most of that was also a blur until the last night, when I sat down next to Megan, drinking her hot-off-the-presses Pinot Noir out of a very fancy glass. And it was there, staring out over acres and acres of grapes, that it happened. Call it a spiritual experience, or the hand of God, or the universe, or whatever you like, but I had a moment. It happened this fast: one minute I very much believed that I would drink forever, and the next (snap), I knew I was done.

Megan: Have you ever been in the presence of a miracle?

Bobby: It was like remembering something—

Megan: I didn’t know it at the time, of course—

Bobby: Where I’d left my keys—

Megan: At the time I doubted every word out of his mouth.

Bobby: Or a book I’d hidden somewhere—

Megan: But now? Three years later?—

Bobby: It was over.

Megan: —after watching him, every day, slay dragons so huge and deadly and terrifying they could level this city?

Bobby: I turned to Megan, stunned by the words that were about to fall out of my mouth: “I’m done.”

Megan: He held up the glass, studying the contents like a map.

Bobby: “I’m not gonna drink anymore.”

Megan: And then he put it down. We sat there, watching the stars—all those tiny little blips in the matrix. In the city, you can never see them, but out there? It was one of those moments where you understand how miraculous the world really is.