When the alcoholic stops drinking and seeks help, good things begin to happen quickly. He looks better and feels better. He is healthier and happier. His self-confidence and self-esteem begin to return. He begins to look at himself and the world around him differently. As time goes on, he feels more comfortable in sobriety than in drunkenness. As life continues, the alcoholic chooses not to drink because life is better than it was in his drinking days. But the sober alcoholic must forever be on guard against the temptation to drink again. At the beginning it will be a battle. New patterns and habits must be put into place, but the alcoholic is on the road to a new life.
Recovery is a discovery. It is a joyful, happy, and positive experience, a discovery of self and of the world. The alcoholic who overcomes the physical addiction and mental obsession with alcohol and begins the process of self-acceptance and self-discovery experiences a world of happiness he never thought existed or was possible for him. It is a life of freedom, peace, happiness, success, and serenity.
"There is no comparison," says Don Newcombe as he looks at his life today in contrast to his drinking years. Most important to Don is the respect he regained from his wife and children. He wonders, with justification, where his three college-attending children would be today if he had not quit drinking.
As is so often the case with recovered alcoholics, Don focuses on his work today as the most important of his life—not his baseball days, not his business days. In his work, he carries the message of alcohol and drug awareness.
Don Newcombe is an alcoholic. The former star pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers now represents the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Rockville, Maryland, and is affiliated with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
I never believed I was an alcoholic. I never believed I couldn't handle my alcohol. All the problems I had—bankruptcy, loss of career, the end of my first marriage after thirteen years, the fact that my current wife was going to divorce me—was just the way my life was, I thought. I never attributed it to my alcoholism.
From the beginning, I drank as much as Don Newcombe wanted to drink. I drank as much as Don Newcombe had to drink or needed to drink. But I was a situation drinker. I drank when the situation warranted my drinking. I didn't drink before a baseball game. If I had to pitch on a given night, I did not drink anything the night before, not even a bottle of beer. I knew what my job consisted of. I knew what was required of me, and I did not drink until after the game was over. I would drink on planes, trains, in hotels, and in clubhouses. I would drink wherever I wanted to, whether I won or lost. If I won, though, it was a lot easier because the manager didn't mind us drinking in the clubhouse. If I lost, everybody was mad, so I went out and drank somewhere else, away from the players.
Drinking really had no ill effect on me, especially in my younger life. It never impaired or impinged upon my success as a baseball player. I had a history of winning seasons. In all the years I played baseball, whether it was in the sandlots, the Negro League, the minor leagues, or the major leagues, I never had a losing season, except maybe one. So I had a success factor in my life. I knew that I was good and what I had to do. No player who ever knew me will tell you that Don Newcombe didn't keep himself in shape. I ran. I ran and ran by myself in the hot sun in Florida. During the baseball season, wherever we were, I would run and run to stay in shape. If I got drunk the night before, I would go out and run and sweat and work hard to keep myself in some semblance of condition. But as time went by, I began to lose that desire. I think that's where alcohol began to play a part in my life that I didn't recognize. I began to lose my desire to run and stay in shape as I got older. I'm not talking about old. I'm talking about twenty-nine, thirty, not forty or fifty. I began to slow down, to lose my desire to keep on working hard in the hot sun for two to three hours. My ambition decreased. I probably drank as much in my big winning year, 1956, as I did in one of my worst years before I retired from baseball.
Billie and I were married in 1960. After we got married, I was playing baseball in Cincinnati, then Cleveland, then Spokane, and finally Japan. After 1962 there was no more baseball playing, no more money coming in from baseball. I went back to my business—a cocktail lounge, a liquor store, and an apartment building in New Jersey—and she went with me. With all of the things I had to do in the cocktail lounge to try to build up a business and keep the cash register ringing, I would drink with people around the clock, from 9:00 A.M. until 2:00 A.M. Billie wasn't drinking and here she's stuck with a guy who comes home after being in the bar all day long, smelling of nicotine and alcohol, and expects her to love him. Here is an intelligent woman, a beautiful woman who finally says, "No, I can't live like this." When I came back to the business, I had a marked increase in my intake of alcohol. I'd always had a weight problem. Beer made me gain weight, and I loved beer. So I shifted from beer to whiskey. I didn't know that I was going into the major leagues of drinking and becoming a full-fledged alcoholic.
The only one who drew my attention to it was Billie, and she's responsible for the fact that I have my life together today. She did one very specific thing. She said, eighteen years ago, "I can't live with you anymore. I'm going to divorce you. I can't sit here and watch you die. I can't let you beat me up. I can't wait for you to destroy these kids, these three babies who don't deserve it. I'm not going to wait for you to destroy yourself. I'm going to divorce you now. If you want to go your way, go your way and leave us alone, and we'll do fine. I'll work or somebody will take care of us. I'll find another man somewhere, but you just leave us alone. If you promise me that, Don, I swear to you that you'll never see these kids again, nor will you be bothered with me again. We don't want anything from you because you don't have anything." And I didn't have anything.
Vulgar, crude, physical toward my wife—that was how I acted when I drank. If I ever put my hands on that beautiful woman again, other than to love her, I want God to paralyze my hands. I haven't done that in eighteen years, but when I was drinking I would slap her around from time to time. We were married six years before I stopped drinking. I would respond to her with my hands. She's a highly educated, very bright woman, and I'm rather crude, a high school dropout. Two people like that can't mix unless something happens, unless some amazing transformation takes place in their association. There is no way they're going to get along if there is something stressful like alcoholism. But I didn't recognize my alcoholism, and my wife was not going to live her life with a person who did the things I was doing. The fact that she loved me was all we really had, but she lost that because of the lipstick on my collars, because of my slapping, because of my yelling at the kids—all the things that go with a guy who is trying to cover up for his lack of education, his lack of intelligence, by drinking. There was no talking; I would not listen. She would not be able to talk to me at all. I would respond by telling her, "Shut up or I'm going to slap your goddamned mouth." So she would either have to shut up or get slapped. She said, "I can't live like this. I'm like a prisoner."
I remember taking strong diet pills. This was one time Billie really got afraid of me, and I think it was the reason she initiated the divorce. I was still drinking alcohol. I don't remember this, but Billie said I took these pills on a Saturday afternoon. When I came home from my bar in New Jersey, she was feeding our little daughter. She said I came into the house and just stood in the kitchen where she was feeding the baby and said, "I'm going upstairs, bitch, and I'm coming downstairs to beat your ass every hour on the hour." She said she looked at me and thought, What is wrong with my husband? What is wrong with him? What did he do? He left here to go to work a couple of hours ago, and here he is now, standing before me, telling me he is going to beat my ass every hour on the hour. For no obvious reason. She told me later, "You went upstairs, and every hour on the hour you came downstairs. You didn't beat me, you just stood in the door and glared at me, with this smirk on your face, and then you went back upstairs. You did that three times." Now, that's insanity. I didn't stop drinking then, but I did stop taking those diet pills, because I'd scared that lady to death.
After deciding that she was going to divorce me in 1965, Billie devised a plan to get back to California to her family, where she could initiate a divorce action and leave me with the failing business. It was going down the tubes anyhow. In the end I lost $350,000 to $400,000 in bankruptcy. She wasn't going to stay there, because she wasn't responsible for it in the first place. I had the business long before I married her. Why should she stay there and suffer the embarrassment of going through bankruptcy proceedings? So she moved to California. I even drove the car. I didn't know what she was doing. I didn't know she was going to divorce me. In my frame of reference I thought she still loved me. I thought that I had it made with my wife. I thought I was King Tut. I thought I had everything under control.
In the end, I quit drinking with her help. The only way I could quit. Eighteen years ago, I didn't know anything about AA, and I wasn't ready to admit that I was an alcoholic. I drank too much, and because of my drinking I got into all the trouble, but I was not a dirty old alcoholic. I wasn't that, not I. I'm only recovered today because of Billie. She stuck by me, she didn't divorce me. She slept on the floor with me because we didn't have any furniture and no money to buy any. We didn't have any food. I'd had a World Series ring on my finger, but that was in the pawn shop because I'd bet once too often on the race horses. But Billie stuck by me. She said, "Look I'll try to love you again. I hate you now, but I'll try to love you again as long as you don't drink, but you drink and I'm going to leave you." It took seven years from the day I stopped drinking in 1966, seven years before she told me she loved me again. That is how much I had hurt her.
There's just no comparison between the way my life is now, since I stopped drinking, and how it was, say, twenty years ago. The most important thing is that I have my wife and the respect of my three children. They're twenty-one, nineteen, and eighteen and all in college. I have a son, Don, a daughter, Kellye, and a son, Tony—two at Howard University and one at Stanford. I think back a lot of times and wonder about where my son Don would be, now that he's twenty-one, if I'd kept on drinking? What would my son be doing? What would my daughter be doing or my younger son? I'll bet they wouldn't be at Howard and Stanford. I'll bet my life on it. If I had kept on drinking the way I was going, even if Billie had stayed with me, there is no way that we would have been able to have the kind of marriage we have, to raise the kind of kids who want to achieve in school and are willing to do what they need to do to become what they want to become. My son called me a little while ago and told me how proud he is of me. Would he have been proud of me if I'd kept on drinking and scaring him and running him ragged, forcing him to hide under the bed while I slapped his mother around? Today I'm totally in control of Don Newcombe's destiny. I was not in control of any part of my destiny back then; alcohol was. I did what alcohol wanted me to do. Now I do what Don Newcombe wants to do, which is very important. That gives me peace of mind. You've got peace of mind when you are in control of your own well-being and the well-being of the people who come into your life.
In the process, I've developed what I refer to as a legacy, the Don Newcombe legacy, outside those records I achieved when I was playing baseball. This legacy allows me to leave something on this earth for somebody else to benefit from, outside of the baseball spectrum, and that's very gratifying. I was the pioneer. I was the guinea pig. I was the one who went public years ago with his alcoholism. Nobody else was doing it. Nobody else dared to do it. I had some qualms about doing it because I was interviewing with a guy about a government job, the job I finally wound up doing. But Billie and my kids finally agreed and said, "Dad, if you're not going to be embarrassed, we're not going to be embarrassed; we're with you." I'll never forget what my son Don said: "Dad, all my friends' parents have problems with alcohol. So don't you worry about how I'm going to feel and what they're going to say to me in school. You do what you've got to do, Dad." This was a thirteen-year-old boy. To hear that from my son gave me the inspiration to go public and become a pioneer in doing something to save lives. I never saved any lives when I was playing baseball, but I save lives now that I am involved in the field of alcoholism. That's something that really surpasses the imagination, to know that you have saved lives, maybe hundreds or thousands.
***
Alcoholics, after quitting alcohol, often speak of living two lives—or of getting a second shot at life. To quit drinking is not an easy thing for an alcoholic to do; however it is the most important decision in an alcoholic's life. Out of that decision good things begin to happen, and life gets better and better.
Gerry Spence sees the positive results, in both his personal and professional life, for having dealt with his problem of alcohol. Peace of mind, confidence, freedom, security, contribution, and unselfishness are part of what he calls a gift.
Gerry Spence is an alcoholic. Recognized as one of America's top trial lawyers, he represented the family of the late Karen Silkwood in their successful lawsuit against Kerr-McGee. Recently he represented a small family ice cream company against McDonald's and obtained a $52-million jury verdict for breach of contract and fraud. He is in private practice in Jackson, Wyoming.
I recognized that I had a problem with alcohol, but I never had the opportunity to work with people who were experienced in dealing with alcohol problems. I lived in a little community, Riverton, Wyoming. This was about fifteen years ago. There weren't sophisticated clinics for people to go to. There weren't any Alcoholics Anonymous groups in the community, so far as I knew. I didn't know any people who had ever admitted they were alcoholics. So I was mostly left to my own devices to deal with this problem and even to recognize that I had it.
None of my friends would say, "You're an alcoholic" or "You've got an alcohol problem." To this day, I don't know of anybody who ever pointed his finger at me and said, "You are an alcoholic." I never went to any doctors about it. I was never jailed. I never missed work. But it was a problem.
As time progressed, I realized that more and more of my time was being used up in dealing with alcohol. It takes a lot of time to be a good drinker. It needs to be done with a little style and around the right kind of people, so I found that I spent a lot of time drinking in the evening. Then I spent a lot of time the next day trying to recover from that. I discovered that more and more of my time, my productive time, which has always been valuable to me and which I have always seen as a sort of gift, was being utilized for drinking.
The value of life was analogized for me one time when I thought back to walking up the hill with my old grandfather Spence when I was a boy. He used to walk from the barn, where he milked the cows every day, up to the house, carrying the milk buckets. He would carry them so carefully up that steep hill. He had an old wrecked, wretched back, full of arthritis and rheumatism, and his legs were crooked and bent, so it was painful for him to walk up that hill with those heavy buckets. I used to trot along beside him, watching him, and I would see how careful he was with that milk, how he never spilled a drop. When I thought back to that I suddenly realized that my life was like Grandpa's bucket. There is only so much milk in life's bucket, and we mustn't spill it, because we can't retrieve it. It can never be gotten back. I realized that day after day I was spilling my life's milk by wasting time drinking and recovering from hangovers. So I started to become aware of the problem, myself.
Then I fell in love with a woman—Imaging, my present wife, my love. She and I were absolutely delirious with love, and when people are like that they do crazy things. We abandoned all common sense, all responsibility. But it was also very painful, because I was faced with the possibility of breaking up a marriage of twenty-one years. I had married Anna when I was nineteen, and we had raised four children together. So this was unthinkable. I couldn't believe that I could do such a thing. I had been a lawyer for all these years, had handled many divorce cases, and had looked with disdain on people who divorced each other. I thought they were silly. Why would they fight like that? Why couldn't they just treat each other decently and live on? Why would they break up? I thought they must be crazy, but then suddenly I was crazy, crazy in love with Imaging. I remember one day, in the middle of the afternoon, when she and I went up to the roof of my office building and sat there, watching the cars drive by, drinking, having a hilarious time, drunk as hell. My drinking was exacerbated in my new emotional state. I drank more because it increased that wonderful, exhausted feeling of being in love, and it decreased the terrible feelings of despair and hopelessness. How could I ever bring myself to leave that good woman, my wife, the mother of my children, for another woman?
I needn't tell you too much of that story, except to say that things got worse as I fell deeper and deeper in love with Imaging. I also had to face the fact that I was injuring, perhaps destroying, other lives, namely the lives of my wife and children. I couldn't bear that, yet I felt unable to do anything about it. I felt trapped. I was in a double bind. I could not give up Imaging. I would rather have died than give her up. Yet I couldn't do what I had to do. I couldn't leave my wife and those kids because I couldn't bear to hurt them.
I can remember walking in to Anna and saying, "I don't have to make a choice between the two of you; I'll keep you both." But that didn't work very long. That didn't resolve it. Then I decided to leave Imaging, to move away from Riverton and give up the law, to get out of town. I would sacrifice my greatest love for my family.
We sold our house. I sold everything we had. Besides being a lawyer, I was also a painter. I sold all my paintings, too. I sold my hunting guns. I sold my pistol collection. I sold our pillows, down to the last pillowcase. I sold every last stick of furniture. I sold my beautiful little hidden ranch at Hidden Valley up in the mountains, up on the reservation. Sold my house, my office, my practice. I sold everything. I moved all of our material possessions down to a vacant store downtown, calling it "Spence's Last Remark," and invited all my friends to come and buy up what was left of Gerry Spence. And then I left Riverton, Wyoming.
We went to San Francisco and, based only on my portfolio of paintings, I was accepted at San Francisco State in a master of arts course. But I soon discovered that I knew more about painting than they did, or at least thought I did—and I still think so. I was there for only a few days.
I couldn't stand to be without Imaging. I went to a psychiatrist and said, "I want to hire you for one purpose." He said, "What's that?" I said, "I want you to help me get the strength to leave my wife and children." The psychiatrist said, "O.K. If that's what you want me to help you do, that's good. You at least know what you want to do. That's more than most people know." So I went to him for a while, a month or so, several times a week, and one day I knew it was time to leave. I came back to Wyoming, leaving my wife and my children in California. I came back to my darling Imaging, and we soon decided what I had to do. I had to get a divorce. She had two children, and had already divorced her husband. I decided I had to divorce Anna, and I did.
When Imaging and I decided that we were going to get married, we had a big talk, which went something like this.
"Honey, you know we have broken up two homes. We have broken up two homes for each other. What gives us the right to do that? You and I have the power to destroy these marriages and these spouses of ours and these children. We have the power to destroy the whole social foundation of those marriages, which means to leave the friends of those marriages, and the extended families. But what right do we have to do that?"
The answer came back: "Well, if we did that, would we be better people than we are? If we did that, could we make our lives in this world more meaningful? Could we make a better contribution? If we were to do that, we would really have to make our lives count." We decided that was what we wanted to do.
Now, I had a large capacity for liquor, liked liquor, and drank lots of it, and Imaging was drinking heavily, too. It would just break my heart when I saw her drunk. I couldn't stand it. I would weep when I saw her that way. But it didn't bother me that I was that way. We agreed first of all that we'd have to stop drinking, because we needed to make the marriage we were going into work.
We decided that if we were going to break up these marriages, these homes, the new marriage had to stand for something. It had to be a good marriage, a foundation from which good, decent, honorable things could come. We had to quit drinking because we needed stability to make this new marriage work. So we did.
We sort of became each other's AA. We quit together, and we hung on to each other. Although I have never attended an Alcoholics Anonymous session, we must have had the same kind of experience that people have there. Every morning we would wake up, have coffee in bed, and begin to talk about what it was like not to drink. We'd exchange information, talk to each other about how it was, about the difficult times, about how strange it felt to be with old friends and not drink around them, about how, now that we were sober, we felt very distant and unrelated to those people and didn't want to be with them any longer, about how we suddenly felt isolated because all of our friends drank. Now we were alone, just the two of us, not drinking. We were afloat out on the big ocean by ourselves. And we talked about that. But there were good things, which we also shared, that came from the experience. It was very painful for me not to drink in the evening, when I usually drank, but it was wonderful not to have the hangover in the morning. And I soon had the sense that I was replenishing my bucket with life's milk because my efficiency was so much greater. There were times when I would come home to Imaging and say, "I feel so bright, so absolutely sharp and creative and full of energy that it frightens me." I didn't know, while I was drinking, that I had all this energy, all of this insight and creative power.
Imaging had her own experience with it, which she communicated to me. Every morning, without fail, we sat in bed, talking about the issues of our lives, which were, "What can we do about our guilt feelings? How can we deal with our children?" We became closer because we no longer had to deal with alcohol. We became closer and shared our feelings, our hearts and souls, our love, our misery, our turmoil, and all the rest of each other. That took the place of alcohol. And it was a great exchange. That was a wonderful exchange—to be able to get the heart and the soul of someone you love in exchange for a bottle of booze.
We're now in our fifteenth year, and neither one of us has had a drink since then—not even one. No beer, no wine, no liquor, no alcohol of any kind. Our quitting drinking and our love are so tied up together that if I were to take a drink, it would mean to me that I was betraying her love, that it had been for naught. It would be a denial of her love and mine.
If somebody said to me, "I want you to have a drink with me and if you do I will give you a million dollars," I'd rather not have a million dollars. And if somebody said, "If you give me your whole life's fortune, I will prevent you from ever taking another drink," I would give him my life's fortune. Out of the struggle that Imaging and I went through came many good things indeed. I quit representing insurance companies and began to represent people. I quit representing banks and represented the poor. I have become even more successful doing that than I was before, without any intent. I just had to become more successful in doing that. I think I have affected the lives of many young lawyers and other people, both clients and nonclients. Those are the rewards that have been given to me as a result of having dealt with the problem of alcohol. And it is a great gift.
***
Blame, anger, worry, resentment, self-pity, and depression are the negatives that the drinking alcoholic deals with every day. Alcohol is as much a mental, emotional, and spiritual disease as it is physical. The alcoholic carries the world on his shoulders.
After he quit drinking, Tom Tryon discovered he had it all backward. "I thought I was drinking because of my problems," he says, "but my problems came from my drinking." Tom's joy about his discovery and his enthusiasm for life today present a dramatic testimonial to life after alcohol.
Tom Tryon is an alcoholic. He is a novelist who counts among his books the best sellers The Other and Crowned Heads. A former film and television star, he is best remembered for his leading role in the movie The Cardinal.
Only two years ago I found myself drinking all day long and all night long. I'd start as soon as I got up in the morning. It was caused by despair, enormous stress, and periods of what I think were total madness. I told myself that nothing mattered except getting the book done, deluding myself that it was going to be done tomorrow or the day after. So I allowed myself to do whatever I thought would keep the words coming and chose to indulge myself in alcohol.
I would get up in the morning and have a glass filled with half sweet vermouth and half vodka. That would be my breakfast. Then I might have an egg. Around noon, I would move to orange juice and Myers's dark rum. I would just kind of swizzle those all afternoon until five o'clock, when I could get down to serious drinking. I would start with martinis and have two, three, four, five, six of them before dinner, then wine with dinner, then Irish coffee after dinner, then black Russians or stingers, until I would just pass out and get up the next morning and start all over again.
Then I discovered the loss of my natural resiliency, on which I had always prided myself. I was not elastic anymore. It had gone and I hadn't realized it. Hangovers would go on for days and days, and they were affecting my work and all areas of my life. My friends were shaking their heads, and I was having some near misses in the car. I was due. I was drinking very, very heavily when I stopped. I thank God that there was a domino principle in effect and that just before the last thing hit me, I stepped out of the way, so it went by me and I fell into good hands.
The biggest discovery I have made is that I had it all backward. I thought I was drinking because of my problems, but my problems came from my drinking. I think that is a very common thing with people. I thought I had all these problems and the way I could handle them best was to drink. It greased the skids. It made everything easier. When I stopped drinking the majority of my problems stopped. I was a victim of the worst anxiety attacks imaginable. I mean, they would put me to bed in a darkened room for hours. I would have to stop whatever I was doing and get into a bed—anybody's bed, anywhere—to deal with them. Most of the time I would drink to oblivion. I don't have anxiety attacks anymore, or very, very rarely, anyway.
To do an interview, I would have to drink and drink and drink. I don't think I ever did one sober. I have never been on a television talk show sober, and I have been on some when I was so drunk that I barely got away with it.
I can't stress enough the enormous disability that I was laboring under with these anxiety attacks. Anxiety attack is a phrase that is bandied around a lot. Most people don't understand exactly what it is. I have deduced myself that there is a very acute correlation between anxiety attacks and drinking. I drank to try to still those attacks.
Many things would provoke an anxiety attack. The thought of having twenty people to dinner. The thought of having to make a speech. The thought of having to make an appearance. The thought of having to hand in chapters. The thought that I was getting older and not progressing as I had hoped. I often tried to explain to people who didn't know anxiety attacks what they consist of. The physical manifestation was the tightening up of all my muscles, the pain and discomfort of that, and knowing full well that my mind was causing it. Black fear. Everything was black. I don't think in black anymore. I think in yellows and oranges and pastels.
If anyone ever picked the wrong profession, I did when I became an actor. I never drank while I was working, but for all of the concomitant things—going to the premières and being a public figure and being a celeb—for all of that, I had to grease the skids. God, what a shock it was later to find out that by stopping this one thing, drinking, all the other things suddenly ironed out.
No one told me. Goddamn it, no one ever told me the problem was alcohol. No doctor ever told me to stop drinking. And I was never dishonest. I never hid my tracks. If I went to a new physician and he asked, as all doctors do, about drinking, I was right up front. I told them I'd been a heavy drinker since about 1940. That's a long time to drink, and I had drunk continually. It became a part of my life. I was raised that way. I couldn't imagine not having it. It was just always there.
I can remember the resentment I felt as an enlisted man in the navy because the officers had booze on board and could drink. When I got out of the navy, by Jesus, I drank.
I was a country-club drunk. There were no alleys with paper bags. I came from a good family. I went to Yale. I always had a job. My drinking was of the elegant, fashionable kind. You met somebody for cocktails or you had brunch with bloody marys. Drinks were always there. If you went to a football game or the senior prom, you pocketed a flask. If you traveled, you took some with you. It didn't matter where you went. Either there would be alcohol where you were going or you took it with you. That's the way we were raised.
My mother taught me how to mix a drink. Get the party started. Give them a good drink. It's all I knew. My parents drank. Their parents drank. Every Sunday after church they came into my grandfather's house next door and sat there with their drinks. All the adults would get together at various houses and the hell with Sunday dinner, they were having a party. They loved to party. I can remember when I was a kid during Prohibition, my father would make bathtub gin in the summer.
I remember being at a dinner where the president of the bank slipped out of sight; he just slid down underneath the table. And they said, "Oh, look, Harold's out." They said, "Harold's in the bag. Harold's in the bag." That's the way I was raised. My father, a terrific guy whom I admired enormously, drank for fifty years and died an alcoholic. My mother is eighty-five years old. She's still drinking. All my friends and all the parents of all my friends drank, and if you didn't, you were square. In college, my roommates didn't drink. I used to look down on them. Who the hell were they? They didn't have any fun. If you didn't drink, you weren't having fun. If I wasn't drunk, I wasn't really with it. I didn't know. I can only plead ignorance. If I'd known then what I have learned in the last two years ... it's remarkable.
It's also remarkable how little it took to get me to go and do something about it in the end. I was having dinner with a friend in a restaurant. I was so drunk that I thought he was criticizing me for something so I got up and left. I just left him in the restaurant. I found out the next day, when his letter came, that he had been supporting my point of view, but I had been so drunk I didn't know it. Then he said, "Tom, please give up drinking." I still have the letter somewhere. I thought, Jesus, I guess I'd better.
All along I had thought, Well, I'm a writer, so I can be a drunk. I had lots of examples, from Faulkner on. I'm just one of those. You're a writer. You're a drunk. It's O.K.
I thought I was cute, I really did. I just thought it was nifty. What it needed was for somebody years ago to say to me, "Tom, you've got a problem." Nobody ever did.
I knew that I was occasionally coming under critical fire from friends, but no one ever came to me. I would hear it around, but always behind my back. It hurt me a great deal. I couldn't understand why they wouldn't come and say it to my face. I was obstreperous, loud in restaurants, displaying lots of unbecoming behavior all the time. I never liked the idea of being offensive to anybody for any reason. I would bend over backward not to be offensive, yet now I know, looking back, that I was offensive to a lot of people for a long time. I was loud, overbearing, demanding, highly critical—all those unattractive things that really are not part of my nature.
I had been thinking about it for some time, for years, off and on, vaguely. I'll do it someday, I thought. Like I'll quit smoking or I'll go to the gym or I'll lose that ten pounds. Whatever. It was one of those things that we say we'll do and we don't. I had a plan and this was part of it. I was going to try to rid myself of the bad habits I had picked up along the way.
I went very heavy into coke, too, for a while. I did a lot of coke. It was at the point when everybody was doing it. Everyone except my mother was doing cocaine, and I don't know about her. It was the thing to do. It kept me slim and happy, and I loved it. It made the world seem the way I wanted it to be. I felt terrific. I was operating absolutely at my top. Everything I said was bright, original, witty, profound. Interestingly enough, I cannot write at all on marijuana, but alcohol and cocaine never stopped me. With every book I've done, many, many parts were written while I was coked up or in an alcoholic miasma.
What I know now is that alcohol is a poison to me. I thought because my father said it was O.K. that it was O.K. I never stopped to question his judgment. The only thing he said was that you were to drink like a gentleman, which meant that you didn't throw up at the table or fall down stinko. Anything else went. I drove drunk in this town for thirty years—from parties, from dances, from affairs, premières, what have you. I drove Cadillacs all over this town, drunk. Why I didn't kill myself or somebody else, I don't know. One day I said, "What's my car doing in the driveway?" The houseman said, "That's where you left it." And I said, "Oh, that's strange." He said, "You had better go out and look at it." So I did. I have a little Mercedes. The whole front of it was V'd in. I had shattered the entire windshield and it cost twenty-two hundred dollars to have the car repaired. To this day I don't know how I did it. I could see my number coming up. It's a wonder to me that something really serious didn't happen.
I truly believe that If I had not stopped when I did, I would not be alive today. It was that serious. On one occasion I tried to throw myself out of a moving car in the middle of rush-hour traffic on Wilshire Boulevard. Another time I went crazy on an airplane, 35,000 feet over Cleveland, Ohio.
I suffered when I gave up cocaine. I had to go through withdrawal from cocaine with a doctor. I nearly killed myself with cocaine. He found more than twenty pustules in my nose, little white infections. All this poison was draining back into my brain. I was falling down. I was dizzy. I would have terrible headaches. I didn't know what it was. Cocaine.
There is no place for fear as a writer or as an actor. You can't be afraid. The drinking was to cover up the fear, to hide it. To hide it from myself. To hide it from other people. To make myself more like I thought I was.
I can't find any holes in AA. I learned there that I'm a lot better person than I ever thought I was. I really lacked self-esteem. This was one of my problems. I grew up a middle son and, although I had been around and done a lot, I just couldn't seem to catch on to who I was. I don't mean to say that I think I know now, but at least I know who I'm not, which I think can be as helpful as knowing who you are, if indeed anyone does know that.
I know I am not a neurotic, the victim of terrible moods that I was before. I was just going about things ass backward. It was all I knew. It was as if I had a terrible headache and took an aspirin for it, not understanding that if I hadn't been drinking I wouldn't have had the headache in the first place. What I have learned is that I do not need alcohol to live a happy life. I just know that alcohol and I don't mix. It was as if I'd slept with a pit of vipers all my life and was constantly getting bitten and poisoned. That's all I knew.
Now I feel that I've got a clean slate. My work hasn't changed, either way. I don't know that it's gotten any better, but it certainly hasn't gotten any worse. And I sleep like a top.
I think sometimes, Why did it take so long? I kid my friends, "Why didn't you tell me?" They say, "You know how it is, you can't tell people." But I think you can. There is nothing that pleases me more than seeing somebody who has a drinking problem go after it the same way I did. I wish that people I had known in the past, who have gone out of my life, could see me today so they could know that there is another side to me.
I am a person of enormous discipline. The discipline that I was given I have turned to good account in writing. I seem to have my own valves. I had them all the time, but I didn't know it. The ritual of drinking was superimposed on my life. I came to California in 1955. I was surrounded by alcoholics. They are all either dead now or still suffering from alcoholism.
I feel, today, that I came in from a terrible storm, a tempest that I'd been in for an eternity. I suffered from madnesses that are just indescribable, and they were all in my mind. Everything seems to go back to fear. I'm not afraid anymore. I'm just not afraid. I was so afraid of people, so eager to please, to make the best impression, to be liked. Now I don't care if they don't like me. I like me. I'm a nice guy. I really am. It's such a pleasure to discover that what I thought was true about myself really is true. I just had a problem. I don't know why it took this long for me to solve it. I've seen a lot of people die of this disease, and it was never a pleasure. I accept my recovery as a great gift.
I've given up alcohol, and there is no question I stay away from it. I don't yearn for it. I don't long for it. People say, "Do you mind if I have a drink?" No, I don't mind. Have a drink. Have all you want. It doesn't bother me.