I was living on a little tiny houseboat in Sausalito, on San Francisco Bay, and it was very beautiful. There were tons of drug dealers on the docks—lots of bohemians, hippie types, and we all drank together, but I preferred drinking alone. I’d go to North Beach, steal everyone’s cocaine. People would buy me drinks ’cause I was funny and sweet. Then I’d have sex with people in the bathroom. Everyone seemed to like that in a girl! People would give me their little bottles of cocaine, and I’d go into the bathroom and I’d do a couple of huge lines, like Sherman cigarettes. Then I’d put a little aside in a bit of toilet paper and put it in my pocket, so by the end of the night, I might have ten, twelve little packages of coke. I’d be able to go home and be by myself with it and a fifth of Bushmills, and come down slowly. That’s what I was doing when I wasn’t “on the wagon.”
When I was “on the wagon,” on day two, it was just two Ranier Ales and all the pills, and I fell asleep about 7 p.m. and I felt great. On the third night, I wanted to stay up longer, so I got a third Ranier Ale and had all the Valium and Halcyon and woke up and felt pretty great. Then on the fourth day, I thought, “This is just ridiculous,” so I got four Ranier Ales, took a bunch of Valium and Halcyon. On the fifth day, I thought, “This really works,” ’cause I wasn’t vomiting, I wasn’t sick. I didn’t have the yolk sack from Bonfire of the Vanities rolling in me. I was drinking so much less. So the fifth day, I went to the store and got into an alcoholic rage of “Who do they think they are trying to control me?” So, first I got my four Ranier Ales. I was so angry I was going to get a couple more. Then I got a fifth of Bushmills and went back to the room and got plowed. That was my week of being “on the wagon.”
When I was thirty-two, the elevator had gone down one more floor. I had finally reached a place where I couldn’t bear it. I screwed something up very badly. Right around the Fourth of July, I had to pick up a package for a family that had a child that was mentally damaged. A beautiful child. They needed for me to be on the dock by 9 a.m. to pick up something that was being delivered that had something to do with their kid. And I slept right through it. Oh my God! It wasn’t a toy for the kid; it was something serious. I don’t know ’cause I never even got it.
Then on the Fourth of July, 1986, I was right off the docks of San Francisco Bay with my publisher, Bill Turnbull of North Point Press, who published my third book to really devastating reviews, which had really plummeted me down the chute. You know, my alcoholism was like the game Chutes and Ladders. I went up a little bit. I might get something written, got published somewhere and read widely. I’d think, “Oh this is the new me, really on top of things,” and I’d take three steps forward. Then I’d go further down the ladder than I’d ever been. Then I’d haul myself up again.
I had gone down a bad ladder when my third book came out. I was with my publisher and his wife, and we were on this little boat watching the fireworks across the bay. We had been drinking all day at a Fourth of July party and I had been smoking dope, the non-habit-forming marijuana, and I couldn’t stop thinking about climbing off of the side of the boat. I was in a good mood; that was what was so troubling. I was with two cherished friends, but I was very drunk, watching the fireworks. I could not get this tape loop to stop. I imagined myself climbing off the side, bobbing up and down in the water, and then going under. I couldn’t stand the thought of getting up again in the morning, ’cause I knew what it was going to be like. I knew I would be sick. Would I have taken someone to bed I didn’t know, or even worse, did know and shouldn’t be with? I would feel rocky and scared ’cause I wouldn’t know what happened.
Our dad died long ago, about seven years, and my younger brother was still feeling very fragile. That was the last thought I had. I wasn’t going to climb overboard because Steve couldn’t handle it.
Bill and Mary walked me home and put me to bed. I woke up in the morning sick as a dog. Vomiting. I called Bill and Mary, and they were really worried. Bill, who I was very close to, said, “Oh Annie, you were really, really in a state last night.” That was just the worst thing anyone had ever said to me: “in a state.” Because that just suggested real madness—Joan Crawford sort of madness. He said it with such grief. I said, “I know, I just need to take it easy.” So I wasn’t going to drink that day, and my kidneys really ached. I was experiencing that more and more because I was drinking a lot of gin. But it didn’t mean I would stop drinking martinis, under the right circumstances, which was like … if it was evening, and I had a bottle of gin! I learned I could flush my kidneys with cranberry juice. I wouldn’t think, “Maybe we should just lay off the gin.” I would think, “I need a cranberry flush.”
Now I decided to just drink beer again. Beer and Bushmills. So, after like three beers, I was off and running again. I ended up in the city, buying cocaine at one of the bars in North Beach, getting totally wasted. Stopping off at the bars on Lombard Street to get even more of everything, getting home after two in the morning, in a blackout.
The next morning, I realized I had two blackouts the previous night, which I’d never had before. I hadn’t gotten hardly any sleep because of the cocaine. I was very scared, so I was just going to drink wine. I took a bunch of Valium, and then I drank a pint of Bushmills and didn’t feel drunk. Sometimes I couldn’t get drunk and sometimes just a little bit would cause me to black out, or after two glasses I’d be impaired. I’d have to take some drugs to get stabilized.
Anyway, my boyfriend brought over two bottles of really expensive pinot noir, and we went up into the loft and went to bed. We started drinking and I blacked out. The third time in a row. I woke up around midnight, and the man was gone. I don’t know what happened at all that night, not that it matters. I guess we finished a bottle ’cause there was one left, but I felt a despair come over me like a niacin flush. A full-body flush of terror. I felt like I would have a blackout every night now, and I was truly scared to death.
That was the Sunday I agreed to pick up the important parcel for those people’s child, and I had overslept. Midnight that Sunday, as it was becoming Monday, I opened the last bottle of pinot noir, took three or four Halcyons—sort of flirting with suicide I think—threw ’em down like peanuts, drank half the wine, lay down, and overslept, so I couldn’t get up for my friends. And that was my bottom.
I woke up on July 7 and it was just over. I don’t know why it wasn’t over July 6 or five years before, or the morning after the Basque restaurant. I ran out of gas, and I knew I was going to die. Either deliberately overdose on all these pills I had or on bad methedrine. I knew I was going to die. I just couldn’t stand being alive, and the funny thing was that I was warm and truly loved. I didn’t have clinical depression. I could get going. I could pick myself up.
So I called a friend who had been clean and sober for about eight years. A really old, beloved friend of my family. He never tried to con me into not drinking, or joining a recovery group, but he was always there for me. So I called him and said, “I really think I’m done.” And he said, “Oh, great.”
Well, it wasn’t great! He started introducing me to a number of people who were clean and sober and sticking together, and who had helped him get sober or who he had helped get sober. They kind of took me under their wing and told me what they had done. And I just thought, “What a fucking joke. You have got to be kidding.” I was religious. I couldn’t believe that I was ever as bad as they were ’cause they would tell me their stories, and I also couldn’t believe that I was anything like them. It was very different to be me. I’m a writer, an artist. People love me. A lot of people I was starting to get to know, who were helping me get sober, had real jobs, and they ended up losing everything. I had nothing to lose, sort of like Bobbie McGee.
I didn’t have a cent—was $12,000 in debt. When I got sober, I rented a houseboat for $300 a month. I didn’t have a car. I asked myself, “Do you want the car or do you want to stop drinking?” I had so many blackouts over the years; I had one time where I drove the car up on t
he curb in a blackout. I had dents in my car. I won’t ever know if I killed anybody with my car. I know I hit a dog once and kept going. I was in some sort of white-light terror flip-out. It was dark and I hit something and I know it was a dog. I hit a deer once and wrecked my car.
And three years before I quit drinking, I said to myself, “You either have to quit drinking or you have to get rid of the car.” Well, that was a no-brainer. I got rid of the car! I took cabs to North Beach, and I stayed home. I like to be alone when I drink. And people would just sort of take me places, for coffee or we’d go to the movies or we’d go shopping at Longs.
I had a friend who was the main person that supported my sobriety in the first couple of years. She was this junkie who was also an alcoholic. She got clean in Synanon. She and I were always broke. She was older than I was and hilarious. I loved her more than life itself. She had what I wanted. She was hilariously funny and had been sober for ten years. I knew that she was as bad as me and that I was as bad as her. So we’d take like $30 and go to Longs or Walgreens and we’d each get a basket and make $30 go so far. One of the first things we got was the Graceland album for about $10 and $20 worth of stuff that made us really, really happy. All the cleaning stuff we needed and a new lipstick, a pad and a really great pen. You could get a ton of stuff for $20. I started to have simple, dumb joys and just kept hanging out with all these sober people.
I didn’t have any contact with my North Beach friends, and a couple of them had gotten sober too. I had lots of people to mentor me, and little by little, I started to learn how to bear being a human. I started to have better self-esteem ’cause I was doing esteemable things. If you wanted to have loving feelings, you did loving things, and that I could get out of myself and help somebody else. That i-s-m of alcoholism—I, self, me—I, self, me—I, self, me. The solution was God and service. Caring for other people, and so I just started healing slowly. My friend Jack, who was this person who helped me, who I called in the very beginning, said, “You are just going to want to tip over the fifty-five-gallon drum of shame and mess and failure and disappointment and terrible episodes of self-loathing and all the awful things you’ve done. All the ways you’ve hurt people. And you’re just going to want to tip it over, but it’s not going to work that way. But if you don’t drink, every time you tell the truth, every time you reach out to help somebody who is also trying to get sober, every time you try to make things right with somebody you hurt or fucked with, you take out a tablespoon. Every time you sit quietly and do your prayers and meditation you take out another tablespoon. Every time you move towards the light and solution instead of the problem, which is this terrible alcoholic mind and this inability to stop drinking once I started. Every time you do something else, you take out another tablespoon.” That’s proven to be true for me.
So what’s happened for me in the seventeen-and-a-half years since then is that I’ve had a child. I’m a single mother. I learned to trust that all of my needs would be provided for, although all of my wants would not be granted. And that God was not some cosmic bellhop, and that God was the source and the relationship upon which I can most depend, and to whom I need to turn in order to remember who I am—which is an alcoholic and drug addict. Somebody who was dangerously close to dying and who is given a daily reprieve based on the healing in community that goes on with brothers and sisters who are on the same path.
I know that no matter what, I don’t pick up a drink. And if my ass fell off, I call somebody else who is sober and who is working a spiritual path, and they help me get through my crisis, without picking up a drink or using.
My best friend died a couple of years after I got sober, and I thought that was the end of the world, ’cause she was sick with breast cancer. But I had learned this way of life where I could show up for people. It’s like Woody Allen said, 90 percent of life is just showing up. I was taught to show up and listen and for everything not to be The National Annie Lamott Crisis Hour, but to bring some healing and some quiet and some faith where I was needed and to be there. That laughter and confidence and crying and just being together would be its own healing. So I was finally able to be the kind of friend I’d always wanted to be, but couldn’t.
It took me a long time to get my career started again after the devastating failure of my third book. It took me awhile to be able to write again. So I just started again and ended up with this incredible career. My first sober book, All New People, is one of my most favorite, favorite books. It was kind of small in scope and sold steadily. It wasn’t a big success to the world, but it was a gigantic success to my soul because it was finally the book I wanted to write. My windows felt like they were washed and very clean, and I had a new perspective on the world.
I always felt that I couldn’t write without alcohol and a little bit of dope, because I relied on the myth that most of the great writers were alcoholic and many of them drank when they wrote. Many of them started out the day hungover, and many, many were alcoholic. My father was a writer and all of his friends drank a lot. It just seemed like they went hand-in-hand with each other, and I wasn’t sure I could unlock my unconscious and subconscious to tap into that dreamscape and soulscape and memory bank that you need to in order to write without alcohol. My mind was damaged by all the drugs and alcohol, and it took awhile of just health. When I was living on the houseboat taking lots of walks and trying to eat better, it was like an ambulatory psych ward, and I couldn’t be expected to bite off much creatively.
Then this thing started forming in me. This piece of work, the prologue to All New People, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I let it form and bob up to the surface. It was kind of a lava lamp moving slowly, but distinctly, and I just started getting thoughts down, but didn’t have any confidence in myself, especially because I had just gotten the shit kicked out of me with Joe Jones. It got devastating reviews and people thought it might end my career, and I believed it to some extent. All of a sudden, again I don’t know why, I knew that when I got up that first sober morning, I was going to go for a run, take a hot shower, have a cup of coffee, and get back to work.
It came flowing out, but it also took me a long time to get my chops back. So this one piece, which is probably twenty pages, which I wrote for Bill Ryan, who was an editor at California Magazine and a very dear friend of my dad’s—it was just wonderful. It was exactly what I always dreamt of writing and it remains one of my favorite pieces. What happened was I took out enough gunk and slime from the fifty-five-gallon drum that I could now see these creative visions that come to me.
There’s a priest who once said that he believes heaven is just a new pair of glasses. By then I really loved being sober and I felt like I could see again. I could understand myself in a whole new way. That I wasn’t “better than” or “worse than.” That there was this terror and grief and rage inside me from my earliest days.
It must be this feeling of deprivation and self-loathing that led me into this journey of self-destruction, and I tried to medicate the pain. Little by little, as I was rediscovering parts of myself that were sealed off because I couldn’t manage that much pain or disgrace. So lots of the prologue of All New People is recovered memories, like Christmas ornaments.
People started teaching me that amazing lesson that you didn’t think your way back to healing, you didn’t think your way back by dealing with your alcoholic mind, and you couldn’t solve your problems because of your alcoholic mind. It was like opening up boxes that were sealed off like in an Edgar Allan Poe story. Understanding why my parents had done or hadn’t been able to do what I had been so starved for. It was wonderful.
It was like those Chinese gift boxes, where you open it and there’s lots of beautiful shredded paper or newsprint, and then you come to a ball and you open it with anticipation and very attentively, and find this funny little thing in it. It might be a beautiful thing. Might be a gag thing. It might trigger your memory. But you’re attuned to it ’cause you’re not obsessed wit
h drinking or getting the next batch of methedrine. You can pay attention. I started writing everything down and then I’d go to the next Chinese gift box, and it would be stuff about my childhood or be stuff about these new dreams I had of having a life with a family and a child.
All that crying I did in therapy and feeling things and getting it down on paper softened my heart. I’d always had a tender heart, but I had a tender drunken heart. Now I had a heart that became a tide-pool where I could take in more of life and just be with it. Deal with it spiritually or creatively. The tide-pool would flow back out to the visible world and maybe into other people or people who were trying to get sober. Give them a little bit of water with a little algae and nutrition and love and breath and whatnot. I was much more permeable, much more honest, because I started telling my secrets.
So those are the most important things about being creative. The softness of heart, taking the walls down, watering the ground in which we’re growing new seeds. Learning to pay attention and learning to tell the truth. How exhilarating the truth is.
At that point I started writing incredibly truthful books. My first books were really truthful but these were sober truthful books. I wrote a journal about being a mother, a sober mother. How crazy and what a mixed grill it was. So I could offer my experience, strength, and hope to other sober mothers. And fathers. To say it’s okay to be angry a lot of the time and really bored. Here’s the solution: leave the room or call a friend. Then I started writing books that were total, radical truth-telling, because I was so exhilarated. All these people would tell me the truth of their sobriety or their drunkenness, and it would give me life.
The Harder They Fall Page 9