by Rich Roll
I still have no idea how we met exactly, or what I might have said to draw her attention. But it didn’t matter. All I recall is her inviting smile, and the fact that I liked her immediately.
Michele worked as the executive director of a newly founded and experimental middle school called the San Francisco 49ers Academy, located in impoverished East Palo Alto and designed to provide individualized attention to at-risk underprivileged youth. I respected her commitment to service—something I lacked entirely in my own life. Soon I was spending most of my time with her down on the Peninsula and commuting each day up to the city for work. Her friends became my friends. And her family became mine. Best of all, I was in love. Or at least, I thought I was.
Meanwhile, I was growing increasingly restless at work. It would be years before I understood that the hole in my spirit had nothing to do with my job—that it required a different remedy. But at the time, I was convinced a career reboot would do the trick. And so I began to look around for a new job. Since I loved film, I thought I’d enjoy the practice of entertainment law. I pictured my law degree as a lever to insert myself into the Hollywood machine.
So I started sending my résumé out, slipping it to everyone I knew with even a tangential connection to Hollywood, including my old Stanford swimming friend John Moffet, who was then a producer on the daily entertainment news show Hard Copy. But nothing seemed to materialize. Then, out of the blue, I received an interview invitation from a law firm called Christensen, White, Miller, Fink & Jacobs—one of the top entertainment litigation houses in Los Angeles. Sure, it was litigation—not the transactional deal-making practice I sought—but it was better than nothing. Curiously, I had no idea how this firm even knew about me, since I’d never sent them my résumé. Better not even ask, I thought.
A few days later, I called in sick to Littler and hopped a flight to Los Angeles to interview with the Christensen firm. As I plopped down in my assigned aisle seat, I was amazed to discover my friend John Moffet sitting in the window seat right next to me—the same John I was partying with that fateful night I cracked my ribs at Stanford Stadium. What are the odds? A happy coincidence, for sure. But nothing more, I thought. It wasn’t until years later that I would divine greater meaning in John’s presence not just on that flight, but in my life. The truth, I’d later realize, was that John was the only reason I was even on this flight to begin with.
I’d eventually learn that some months prior John had passed my résumé to a young lawyer I’d never met named Chris Green,* then in-house counsel at Hard Copy. Chris was impressed with my credentials and, utterly unbeknownst to John and me, had passed the document along to Christensen, Hard Copy’s outside counsel. In a stroke of great ironic harmony, many years later I’d have the pleasure of working closely with Chris, and ultimately I’d play a large role in helping him discover sobriety. John and Chris, through a few tiny gestures, managed to completely change my life. And in turn, I was later placed in a position where I could share with Chris what had saved my life so he could save his own.
I got the job. And within a few short months, I’d packed my bags for what would be my final move. Destination: Los Angeles. Michele and I were still going strong at this point, and despite the distance, I was determined to make our relationship work. A few months later, I even popped the question at sunset on the beach in Santa Barbara, during one of our many romantic getaways. She said yes. We were getting married. The plan was that we’d host the ceremony in her hometown of Palo Alto, but that she’d soon relocate south so we could build a life together. Things were looking up.
From the word go, my work at Christensen was all-consuming—beyond intense. “The Firm,” as I like to call it, was home to some of Los Angeles’s most elite “super lawyers” and ground zero for some of Hollywood’s most high-profile disputes. It had its fingerprints on everything from the famous O.J. Simpson and Rodney King cases to top-level city politics and major movie studio disputes. No, this wouldn’t be the relatively polite and gentlemanly practice of Littler. This was hardball. Roll up your sleeves, get dirty, and in the case of some employees, even push the ethical envelope. In 2006, for example, name partner Terry Christensen was indicted on charges that he instructed famous Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano to unlawfully wiretap a litigation opponent. The drama played out in the halls of Christensen was the stuff of Hollywood lore, the métier of Dominick Dunne and the pages of Vanity Fair. And I was dropped right in the middle of the action.
My first day, I was summoned to the office of Skip Miller, one of Los Angeles’s most feared attorneys. As I sat across from him to receive my first assignment, the irony of once again voluntarily submitting my life to the whims of a powerful overlord named Skip was not lost on me. That marine sniper turned swim coach had now morphed into a tenacious litigator. And I was his submissive pawn.
My first assignment was to draft an appellate brief for a prominent client. The junior partner assigned to the task had just taken maternity leave, and the matter fell entirely into my hands to handle. Alone. The only problem? I’d never written an appellate brief—a task usually reserved for a small team of lawyers, not one clueless associate whose only area of legal expertise involved protracted disappearances from the office. But I couldn’t let Skip see me sweat. Not on my first day. As I swallowed the terror and accepted the charge, he left me with one final remark: “Don’t drop the ball.”
I didn’t. For the next few weeks, I immersed myself in the matter, combing through boxes of documents and poring over case law to deliver a brief that proved instrumental in winning the appeal. And so from that moment on, I belonged to Skip. I was his boy. Sure, he was demanding. He expected much from me. But behind the intimidating mask, there was a devoted family man and a mentor who pushed me hard. Most important, when I eventually struggled through the most difficult time in my life, he stood steadfastly by me.
Outside the office, there was one thing I learned quickly. When it comes to drinking and driving, Los Angeles doesn’t screw around. From the moment I started getting wasted at eighteen, I’d been pulled over by the police for suspicion of drunk driving no fewer than nine times. It seems like a lot. But when you consider how much I drove while inebriated, I should have been pulled over far more often than I was. Either that or maimed, dead, or responsible for someone else’s maiming or death. Yet each and every time the red and blue flashed in my rearview, I somehow managed to wiggle free without arrest. Sometimes it was fast-talking. Other times, just blind luck. I prefer to believe something outside myself was looking out for me—call it God, my Higher Power, my Guardian Angels, or the Universe. The label matters little.
But my luck was about to finally run out.
It was a particularly warm October evening when I began to detect that all too familiar sense of restlessness starting to throw me off my already precarious sense of balance. As the eerie, hot Santa Ana winds blew wide through the open windows of my apartment, I could feel my dormant demon stir. I should go to bed, I thought. I have a lot of work tomorrow.
Minutes later, though, I was wending my way through the urban morass from Westwood to Hollywood, a tumbler of vodka between my legs. With the music blaring, I was firmly saddled in that sweet spot of distorted perception where everything finally makes sense. I was in the groove. Several nightspot stops later—and after further fortification from beer, vodka, and shots of Jagermeister—I was doing a liquid fade into beautiful oblivion. That’s when it happened.
Bam! My next memory was the sound of crushing metal, cracking plastic, and a broken horn. Somehow, I’d just decimated the rear end of a small sedan. Shit. It took less than two minutes for the cops to arrive, but only seconds for them to haul my goose limbs out of the car and handcuff me to the bus stop bench on the corner. In L.A., the cops don’t mess around. If you get pulled over, the assumption is always that the car is stolen, there’s a warrant out for your arrest, you have a shotgun under the seat, and you’re high on crack. And until proven
otherwise, you’re treated accordingly. In my case, harsh treatment was warranted. On the Breathalyzer, I blew a 0.29 percent—more than three and a half times the legal limit. Most people would be passed out at this level. In fact, anything above 0.30 percent is considered lethal. But drive a car? Not just a bad idea, but close to impossible.
I was uninjured. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the elderly woman I rear-ended. She was taken to the hospital and ultimately suffered from severe whiplash and chronic neck and back problems. I wish I could say that the moment caused my heart to swell with shame, remorse, and compassion. But mostly what I felt was the fear that comes from contemplating going to prison—that and the painful pinch of the steel handcuffs that were cutting off blood supply to my hands. I spent the better part of the night in jail before my allotted phone call roused Adam Glick—my friend and former Skadden office mate now working as an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. He was kind enough to come to my rescue, post bail, and get me home in one piece, just as the sun began to rise.
A day of reckoning? Not so fast. A scare, for sure. But a failure when it came to modifying my ways. Everyone gets a DUI, I told myself. What’s the big deal? I gave little thought to the condition of the poor woman I hit, pushing the painful image deep into my unconscious. Let the insurance company handle that one. To truly consider my actions would require a change in behavior—something I wasn’t yet ready for.
In fact, not two months later, I was driving home after the firm’s Christmas party when the cops once again pulled me over—this time for driving the wrong way down a one-way street in Beverly Hills. The wrong way! It was 3:30 A.M. on a Friday night. And this time I blew a 0.27 percent. After a stern lecture, it was back to jail for the night. My second DUI, just weeks after my first.
Come Monday morning, I was summoned to Skip’s office. I knew something was terribly wrong when he shut the door behind me and looked me right in the eye.
“Take a seat. We need to talk.”
Uh-oh.
“I got an interesting call yesterday from my friends over at BHPD. Driving the wrong way down a one-way street? A blood alcohol level of 0.27 percent? And from what I understand, this isn’t the first time?”
Skip handled a lot of work for both the Los Angeles and Beverly Hills Police Departments. And these people weren’t just his clients, they were his friends. In fact, Skip had a personal relationship with the very officer who arrested me. When I was booked, the officer lifted my business card from my wallet, noticed I worked at Skip’s firm, and promptly gave him a heads-up call. I’m screwed.
“Are you firing me?”
At the time, Skip and I were knee-deep in preparing for trial in defense of the general manager of the Rose Bowl, who was being sued for sexual harassment. I’d devoted myself entirely to this case, spending countless hours with the client at the Rose Bowl, interviewing witnesses, taking all the depositions, and drafting all the pretrial briefs and motions. In classic Skip form, we had declined all plaintiff attempts to settle and were just weeks away from the jury trial I was meant to second chair. My first trial.
“I thought about it. But no. I don’t take pleasure in getting into your personal life. But you have a problem. A big problem. I don’t want to get any more calls. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Just deal with it.”
He handed me a card for a top criminal defense attorney friend of his named Charlie English and made it abundantly clear that I’d be hiring him immediately.
“We’re about to go to war. I can’t have you in jail. I need to know that you can show up and do what’s required.”
“I won’t let you down.”
True to his word, that was the last we ever spoke about what happened.
I’d never been so scared in my entire life. And so I was determined to live up to my promise. The next day, I paid Charlie my first visit.
“You’re probably going to jail,” he told me straight off. Intimidatingly tall, he was a silver-haired old-school hardass who pulled no punches.
“I can’t go to jail,” I replied, quaking, my armpits drenched in sweat. Just thinking about it made me want to vomit.
“Why not? You’re a criminal,” he replied. They’d do what they could, but with two DUI arrests looming, dodging jail time was a tall order, even for the best attorney. And he was the best.
While he was serving up the truth, he also pointed out that I was a straight-up alcoholic.
Of course, I knew I was. On some level I’d always known. It’s why I never tried hard drugs. If I tried cocaine or heroin, I knew instinctively that I’d love it immediately. I was susceptible to the pull of anything that would take me out of myself. Yet Charlie was the first person to attach to me the label I deserved. Alcoholic … It was jarring. But on some weird level, a relief to finally hear. No more innuendo. All the cards were on the table.
“Get your ass to an A.A. meeting. Today,” Charlie commanded, and I was ready to oblige. But then I received an unimaginable stroke of good fortune: the West Los Angeles Courthouse had somehow misplaced the file on my first DUI arrest. They simply lost the docket. Thus, I was never prosecuted for that offense. “I don’t know who is looking out for you from above,” Charlie said, shaking his head, “but this never happens. Ever.”
As for the second arrest, well, let’s just say that the Beverly Hills court never discovered my October arrest. I ended up pleading guilty to the December DUI as a first-time offender and avoided jail time in favor of probation and mandatory drug and alcohol counseling. As for the poor woman I rear-ended, I was sued. But my insurance settled the case.
In other words, I dodged a serious bullet. But more important, I was finally ready to face my demons.
I didn’t know anything about the real A.A. My only point of reference was rooted in bad television: that image of chain-smoking old men in trench coats sitting semicircle in a damp basement, heads hung low in endless lament about the sorry state of their broken lives. Weak was all I thought. Part of me just wanted to handle my problems on my own. But I vowed to Charlie I would go. And anyway, there was a pesky court order mandating my attendance.
My first meeting was at noon in a whitewashed, fluorescent-lit, windowless conference room in Century City’s ABC offices. The plan was to arrive late, avoid eye contact, and just quietly take a seat under the radar. Preferably in the back. Grit it out for an hour, get my court card signed, and bust a move. So I awkwardly shuffled through the door just as the meeting was about to commence. Mission accomplished. But my first glimpse of the group shattered my preconceptions. Far from the bad breath and curmudgeonly scowls I expected, the room was bright and alive with smiling, mingling professionals: men of all ages in snappy suits, and chatty attractive women catching up on their lunch break over healthy salads and Starbucks lattes. Everything about it said, Welcome. Take a seat. We’re here for you.
Oddly, my first thought was Why are these people so happy? I was utterly terrified.
Conspicuously keeping to myself, I naively assumed nobody could tell I was “new.” Later I would discover just how painfully obvious my act was. Judging correctly that I was a rookie, Eric, a young, bespectacled lawyerly-looking guy, handed me a tattered blue book and requested that I read aloud a passage entitled “The Promises.” Not exactly what I had in mind. Gulp.
With hands trembling and voice cracking, I began to spit it out. “If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through.…” But before I could cull even the slightest bit of meaning from the passage’s first sentence, there was an interruption.
“Who are you?” more than a few people called out in an overlapping imperfect unison; a disruption that sent bolts of panic up my spine.
“Uh, my name is Rich,” I managed to stammer.
“And what are you?” asked Eric. What am I? What kind of question is that? I flashed once again to my only point of reference—television—searching for the appropriate response.
>
“My name is Rich.… And I’m, uh … an alcoholic?”
It was the first time I’d ever spoken those words aloud. And if you’d told me I’d ever utter them before a group of complete strangers, I would have said I was more likely to undergo a sex change. But the effect on my psyche was instantaneous, and unexpectedly profound. Even more curious was the group response that followed: “Welcome, Rich! You’re not alone.”
It felt like a fifty-pound backpack had suddenly been removed from my shoulders, replaced with a warm blanket that deflected shame and enveloped me in a protective shield of community. Maybe they do understand, I thought. Is it possible?
For the remainder of the hour, I listened attentively as people shared their stories. What it was like; what happened; and what it’s like now, as it’s called. Some people were a lot like me, and others were so radically different it was hard to imagine we shared one iota of common ground. Yet I was struck dumb by how much I identified with what each and every person had to say. Not necessarily the facts of their experience, but the feelings. That sense of feeling apart. Different from.
But that doesn’t mean I was suddenly struck sober. Yes, I began attending this meeting somewhat regularly. But I remained unwilling to jump in with both feet; instead, I resorted to my default modus operandi: skate through on the least amount of effort possible. I was what you’d call a tourist.
In A.A., it’s repeatedly said that “half measures will avail you nothing.” But I thought I had them fooled on that one by stringing together a few solid respites from drinking. Thirty days here; ten days there. Even six months at one point. But these dry intervals were exactly that—dry, but far from sober. At the time, I didn’t understand the difference. I assumed it was normal to suffer uncomfortable teeth-grinding periods during which I’d resist my powerful urges while simultaneously plotting the day that I’d inevitably drink again. Unfortunately, that day appeared at regular intervals. Time and time again I relapsed, often in dramatic fashion, picking up not just where I left off but sometimes in a place that was far worse.